From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent: A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature 9783839452097

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Tijana Matijević From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent

Lettre

Tijana Matijević (PhD), is independent researcher currently teaching post-Yu­ goslav literature, culture, and languages at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena and the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. Her research focuses on the feminist writing and the continuities between the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literatures.

Tijana Matijević

From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature

With minor changes, this book represents the text of my dissertation, written and defended at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, under the guidance of Prof Angela Richter to whom I owe gratitude for her encouragement, support and advice. I thank Prof Ana Dević who acted as the second reviewer of my doctoral thesis for her ideas and amity. My thanks also go out to: Prof Gabriela Lehmann-Carli, member of my defence committee; Dušan Hajduk-Veljković and Eva Kowollik from the Department of Slavonic Studies, and their families; John K. Cox for reading and revising the manuscript; Srđan Đurović, Divna Soleil, Sta­ nislava Barać and Ana Fazekaš for reading the text, and supporting me along the way, together with Slaviša Raković, Branka Banja Đoković, Gagi, Marie and Jecavci; Irena Javorski for the critical bibliographical assistance; Jessica Ammer for her help, knowledge and friendship; my mom and sister for their care and faith. Tati, nani, Mikiju.

Gefördert durch den Deutschen Akademikerinnen Bund e.V.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de

© 2020 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5209-3 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5209-7 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839452097 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

I I 1. I 2. I 3.

Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent ........................ 7 Post-Yugoslav Literature: A Utopia and a Field........................................ 15 A Feminist Framing of the post-Yugoslav Literary Field .............................. 23 Summary .......................................................................... 32

II II 1. II 2. II 3.

Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction ................... 35 Borders of Time and Space and Authorship: “Via del Corso I”.......................... 41 On Real and Fictional Identities: “Stvarni konobar” ................................... 47 Totalitarianism and Misogyny: “Zlatna priča” ......................................... 56

III Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine ................................................... 65 III 1. Tanja Stupar Trifunović’s Satovi u majčinoj sobi: ‘Writing the Body’ as a Signpost ..... 73 III 1.1. To Meet the (M)other ......................................................... 75 III 1.2. Female Difference and Writing ............................................... 80 III 2. Tea Tulić’s Kosa posvuda: How to Write the Death of Mother .......................... 85 III 2.1. Female Camaraderie vs. Real World .......................................... 86 III 2.2. Back to Chora? On Mother and Writing ........................................ 92 III 3. Ivana Bodrožić’s Hotel Zagorje: The Death of the Father and the Coming of Age as the War Novel ...................................................................... 97 III 3.1. To be a Refugee: Internalization and Reproduction of Enmity ................. 99 III 3.2. Lures and Fears of Coming of Age........................................... 105 III 3.3. An Absent Witness to the Father’s Death...................................... 110 IV

The Other Writing: Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction ........................................................ 117 IV 1. Snežana Andrejević’s Životu je najteže: A ‘Two-faced’ Narrator ....................... 119 IV 1.1. On the Front Line: Trans, Trance ............................................ 129 IV 2. Luka Bekavac’s Drenje and Viljevo: Beyond Severed Ends of Space and Time......... 134 IV 3. The Medium is the Message: Female Voices and Sound.............................. 143

V V 1. V 2. V 3. V 4. V 5. V 6. VI

What to Do With the Past? Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju ........................................... 151 On the Real, Fictional and Female Cowboys ......................................... 153 Staging the Western. Why the Past Does Not Fit the Present? ....................... 156 Saint Fjoko Festival: Difference and the Carnevalization of Gender .................. 162 The Body/House Trope: Essentialization and Emancipation.......................... 168 Marija Čarija’s Western: Righteousness and Tragic Heroin ............................175 Migrant, Worker, Author: An Open End as the Beginning ............................. 180

VI 1. VI 2. VI 3. VI 4. VI 5.

What to Do With the Past? Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba............................................... 189 Objects of the Past, Past of the Objects: Past as Belonging(s) ...................... 193 Parental Home: On (Im)possible Identifications ..................................... 200 Pol and Politika: Women in Pairs and the Politics of Literature ...................... 207 Colonizing a Utopia: Jouissance, Difference and Authorship ......................... 223 Neo-avant-garde and Feminist Foundations of post-Yugoslav Literature............. 229 VI 5.1. Appendix: Situationist International and the Esoteric Neo-avant-garde in Bernardijeva soba ........................................................... 245

VII

Conclusions. Inherited Possibility, Or: Choosing The Optimal Variant ............... 251

Bibliography............................................................................ 257

I

Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent Our subject is what John Lampe called a change that was felt in the atmosphere from the time when the word ‘Yugoslav’ entered the language and came into everyday use. (Dubravka Stojanović)1   By WOMEN I mean not only the biocultural entities thus represented, as the empirical subjects of sociopolitical realities, but also a discursive field: feminist theory. (Rosi Braidotti)2

The title of this book refers to the works of fiction produced in ‘today’s Yugoslavia’, as the closest to an unambiguous definition of the cultural (and political) space existing as the successor of historical Yugoslavia(s). One clearly needs a lot of quotation marks and brackets in order to talk about and study this space: they communicate the discrepancy between the lived experience of a single cultural field, and at the same time its fragmentation on the level of the administrative political entities, post-Yugoslav nation-states. And while from the present day perspective an experimental qualifier ‘today’s Yugoslavia’ seems quite fitting, back in the period this research was initiated, any attribute trying to circumscribe the space in question was seen as either inadequate or imprecise, since it simply could not encircle the complexity of the space which simultaneously still existed and did not exist anymore. However, one of the main conclusions of this research is precisely that complexity of this space does not mean that it resists theorization; on the contrary, it motivates it, together with opening the whole new terminological and conceptual field in the last two decades.

1 2

Stojanović 2015. Braidotti 1997: 61.

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From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent

After Yugoslavia had dissolved, the term ‘post-Yugoslav’ was seeking legitimization, as the phrase which would express exactly the complexity of the end and a continuation in a single word, as it was ironically suggested most probably the first time the term was used – at least inside the literary context – in Dubravka Ugrešić’s book of essays The Culture of Lies (1995): “‘I don’t know who I am any more’ […]. ‘I am a post-Yugoslav, a Gypsy.’” (Ugrešić 1998: 7).3 Nevertheless, the term had been also reinforced in the theoretical discourse, among other proposals, as analogous to the process discussed within post-colonial studies: ‘post’ – in Bhabhian phrasing – denotes a “‘liminal’ time […] meaning not ‘after’, but rather ‘the time never completely ‘beyond’” (Rakočević 2011: 209).4 Hence, though disputable, the term had actually started effortlessly circulating to define literary works produced in the spaces of former Yugoslavia, becoming at the same time an effective political marker of anti-nationalist, arguably even pro-integrationist, but generally anticonservative cultural products and concepts.5 The title of this paper was decided along these lines too, and though already some alarming signals about its redundancy appeared – the issue I touch upon in the following section – I decided to keep the qualifier ‘post-Yugoslav’ and apply it as a historical term, one that marks a period of Yugoslav histories and cultures, that is, precisely the one of dissolving Yugoslavia and what emerges on its ruins, or as its effect. This need or even a necessity to operate within a single cultural space has to do with the violent break up of the country of Yugoslavia and the subsequent continuous discourse of its delegitimization. Post-Yugoslav nation-states constituted by ethnonational identity utilized culture as a main instrument of ethnonational homogenization, distinction and eventual sense of superiority.6 Rastko Močnik describes ‘national culture’ as a “secret inborn knowledge possessed exclusively by the members of the community” (Močnik 2016: 180), emphasizing the “sad role played by the writers and their associations in the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed it” (ibid.). This paper is, therefore, devoted to answering the questions why certain body of works should be read inside this entire discursive and historical dynamics, at the same time drawing some conclusions on how the writings 3 4 5

6

First published in Dutch in 1995 as De cultuur van leugens (Amsterdam: Nijgh&van Ditmar). In 1996 it was published in Croatian (Zagreb: Arkzin) and in 1998 in English (see Bibliography). Unless otherwise indicated, the translations to English are mine. In my 2016 article “National, Post-national, Transnational. Is post-Yugoslav Literature an Arguable or Promising Field of Study?” I dealt in detail with the meaning and circulation of the term ‘post-Yugoslav’. Numerous studies have been written on the topic, still one of the most prominent authors of the discourse on the interaction among nationalism and culture is the anthropologist and publisher Ivan Čolović. Some of his studies include: Bordel ratnika. Folklor, politika i rat (1993), Politika simbola. Ogledi o političkoj antropologiji (1997; Eng. The Politics of Symbol in Serbia, 2002), Balkan – teror kulture. Ogledi o političkoj antropologiji, 2 (2008; Eng. The Balkans: The Terror of Culture, 2011), Za njima smo išli pevajući. Junaci devedesetih (2011).

1 Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent

of the contemporary authors of ‘today’s Yugoslavia’ help understand and define the very context they write in. These two aspects define the subject matter of this study: post-Yugoslav literature. The two apparently spatial entities from the title – Post-Yugoslavia and a female continent – have been chosen as the two concepts indicating a post-Yugoslav literary trajectory: these two utopian ends signify the post-Yugoslav literature as a feminist discourse. ‘Post-Yugoslavia’ is the name (or one of the possible names) of the ‘today’s Yugoslavia’, that doesn’t exist as an administrative territory, but it ‘happens’, it is present as a cultural and discursive reality. Recent appearance of the nouns Post-Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslavism also support this.7 Yet, while the ‘postYugoslav’ has been a contested term and Post-Yugoslavia barely exists, female continent is a phrase that is in circulation. In the local context, feminist literary scholars and authors extensively use this expression to refer to the women’s writing, revisiting the ‘female continent’ from the Vojvodinian and Yugoslav author Judita Šalgo’s (1941–1996) posthumously published novel Put u Birobidžan (Journey to Birobidzhan, 1997). A female continent is a utopian place the protagonists of this novel try or desire to reach, for it represents a haven, an alternative societal structure and, therefore also a possibility of different history. A utopian female continent in this research is the figure of female authorship, denoting both a ‘remote’ and a resilient status of women’s writing in the post-Yugoslav space, marking the striking progression of female and feminist writing in the last 20 years. The position of women is refracted inside the literary field as – above all – the question of female authorship, an essential subject of the feminist literary criticism, that is, gynocriticism as the discipline focusing on the female literary traditions, women authors, relationship between the gender, writing and canon. This already classical feminist analysis of literature has been applied to show that together with the constitutive role feminist and women’s writing have for the postYugoslav literature, the struggle of women authors to overcome the masculinist, patriarchal and often also misogynist cultural setting is continuous. The feminist reading as a strategy of the analysis is employed precisely to show that “unless the critical or historical point of view is feminist, there is a tendency to underrepresent the contribution of women writers” (Tyson 2006: 84). Yet, whether the emphasis is put on a sociological perspective of the literary production, or on the artistic practices themselves, the women’s writing as the practice of writing is outside the masculinist and patriarchal economy of discourse, showing that an “abstract subject that is allegedly a priori given the freedom of speech […] does not exist past sexual script and its power asymmetry” (Čale Feldman and Tomljenović 2012: 25). 7

In the title of the 2016 volume: Facing the Present: Transition in Post-Yugoslavia: The Artists’ View (edited by Renate Hansen-Kokoruš ), and as the concept analogous to Yugoslavism in historian Dragan Markovina’s 2018 book Jugoslavija u Hrvatskoj: (1918.–2018.): od euforije do tabua.

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From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent

Together with the gynocrytical inquiry and the feminist critique as a political and polemical discipline,8 this analysis draws on the poststructuralist psychoanalytical space of the text as the écriture féminine. Briefly put, the French post-structuralist feminist school that conceptualized the notion enabled thinking the possibilities of the “discursive representation” (Gross 1986: 76) of non-phallic and non-masculine bodies and identities, by revealing that at the interface of language, power and the body “women’s oppression, and their resistances to oppression, can be located” (ibid. 70). The connection of Post-Yugoslavia and a female continent illustrates the thesis of this research: the interconnectedness and interaction of the major theme of the post-Yugoslav writing – the past of Yugoslavia and its interruption by the war – with the exploration of gender, sexuality and body in the narrative and along the process of the text production. The analysis follows the ways in which the feminist writing of gender, body, sexuality, and social and cultural hierarchies brings to light the past of socialist Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav wars. Therefore, a type of crossover writings – integrating the ‘performance’ of the past and the ‘performance’ of the body, or ‘performance’ of the sexual difference – are the corpus of works representing the post-Yugoslav literature as a feminist discourse. In view of that, this book is a study of the post-Yugoslav literature as a feminist discourse focusing predominantly on the beginning of the second decade of this century (2010–2015). This interval is seen as a period of confirmation and development of ‘literary feminisms’, with a more visible presence of women authors in the literary scene. Nevertheless, besides the above-mentioned major themes, altered interpretations of the Yugoslav wars, topics of Yugoslav socialism and the Yugoslav Neo-avant-garde, the shifts in the perception of genres, but also an ‘oldfashioned’ take on the écriture féminine and the new possibilities of literary comparisons enabled by almost twenty years long tradition of the post-Yugoslav literature are circumscribed by this view. The period preceding the year 2010 is presented as a discursive and historical background of the analysis, whose critical features and some of the authors – mostly those with the international reception – are solely pinpointed here.9

8

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The texts of Biljana Dojčinović are informative regarding the history and theory of feminist literary criticism, and its development in the local academia and theory. The varieties and different ‘schools’ of feminist literary criticism with the focus on gynocriticism are analysed in her 1996 article “Ginokritika: istraživanja ženske književne tradicije” together with the whole thematic issue of the journal Ženske studije: Američka feministička kritika she edited (see Bibliography). Many of these authors are exiles, which according to some interpretations makes them an emblematic group of writers constituting a post-Yugoslav literary discourse as ‘exilic’ (see the following footnote).

1 Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent

The first part of this period – in which the post-Yugoslav as a term first appeared – concerns literature written along the dissolution of Yugoslavia up to the end of the decade (roughly 1990-1999). Already in the beginning, post-Yugoslav writing has been clearly articulated from the feminist standpoint. Beside the activation of the phrase ‘post-Yugoslav’, the link that Dubravka Ugrešić had made between Yugoslav women’s writing and post-Yugoslav literature, the fusing of the topics of exile and memory, social criticism and different feminist modifications of the romance and other ‘women’s genres’ is what has principally shaped the postYugoslav literature. The narativization of the first experiences of war and exile – what some researchers saw as a specific post-Yugoslav genre (Rakočević 2011; Duda 2017; Mijatović and Durić 2018)10 – marks the works of the already critically acclaimed Yugoslav authors, David Albahari, Bora Ćosić, Slavenka Drakulić, Mirko Kovač – to name a few. Also, the writers who published their first novels during the war, like Vladimir Arsenijević (U potpalublju, 1994; Engl. In the Hold, 1996) and Nenad Veličković (Konačari, 1995; Engl. Lodgers, 2005), joined this group of authors who narrativized the dissolution of Yugoslavia as an autobiographical experience. David Albahari’s Kratka knjiga (Short Book, 1993) is probably the first work to launch the issue of post-Yugoslav literature as an aspect of the narrative. The story about the autofictional figure of a writer is succeeded by the author’s note in the end of the novel in which he discusses the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the effect this had on him and his writing. The narrative itself is forged in a type of a spatial and temporal void suggesting the shift of both historical and literary reality. Also, Nenad Veličković’s novel Konačari about the Sarajevo siege was one of the first literary evidences of war, told from the perspective of a young girl. Such a focalisation is suggestive for the discourse of post-Yugoslav literature generally, together with the criticism of the hitherto proscribed topics of nationalism, and social and economic devastation. Needless to say, even a glance at the bibliography of the post-Yugoslav literature shows that these authors and their works have become a standard topic of studies, dissertations, and anthologies. A provisional second half of the interval falls in the first decade of the new century, whose beginning coincided with the political changes in Serbia and Croatia.11 While Aleksandar Hemon would be one of the most significant authors – owing in part to his peculiar type of belonging to the post-Yugoslav field as the author 10

11

Rakočević theorizes “exile and emigrant narratives” (Rakočević 2011: 204) as one of four “subcategories” of the post-Yugoslav writing, while Duda writes about a topical post-Yugoslav literary “exile-nomadic matrix” (Duda 2017: 46). Mijatović and Durić emphasize that numerous works from former Yugoslavia follow genre strategies pertaining “exile experiences in the form of the pseudo-autobiographical modus” (Mijatović and Durić 2018: 87). I refer to the Social Democrats (SDP) coming to power in Croatia after the ten years rule of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), and the so-called ‘October 5 Revolution’ when Milošević was overthrown.

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who writes in English – to join the mentioned community of authors, this period (2000–2010) is more closely related to the topic of this research. It had been marked by the appearance of numerous women authors of younger generation, not just in the field of literature, but also in other cultural fields (perhaps most prominently in cinema and theatre).12 Hence, while the female authorship is largely ‘normalizing’, or mainstreaming in this period, the post-Yugoslav literary discourse is further developing and diversifying, by dealing with the war from the specific female perspective, but also integrating the complexity of remembering and forgetting the past, and with these interrelated issues of responsibility and politics of memory. Therefore, the post-Yugoslav literature has been conceptualized as an expressively politicized discourse engaging in social criticism and almost effortlessly overcoming the traditional problem of the artistic, and therefore also literary autonomy. Most of the authors whose works were analysed in this paper publish their first fictions at the beginning of this period, together with other authors of the younger generation (born approximately 1970–1980) like Lamija Begagić, Slađana Bukovac, Šejla Šehabović, Maša Kolanović, Tatjana Gromača, and poets like Adisa Bašić and Dragana Mladenović, present also in German translation.13 Novels by Daša Drndić (1946–2018) published in this period expand the post-Yugoslav literary discourse by exploring and narrativizing the Holocaust – and the contemporary forms of fascism – interacting with the writings of Danilo Kiš, David Albahari, and Filip David. Two studies published in Germany in 2009 by Katja Kobolt Frauen schreiben Geschichte(n): Krieg, Geschlecht und Erinnern im ehemaligen Jugoslawien, and in 2010 by Damir Arsenijević Forgotten Future: The Politics of Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina research exactly this ‘transitory’ period of post-Yugoslav literature, with a focus on women authors. Both of the studies conceptualize the same discursive space of the post-Yugoslav women’s writing and represent an important theoretical and analytical backdrop of this research. The beginning of the last decade – the years 2010 and 2011 respectively – mark a conceptual threshold for the post-Yugoslav literature as a feminist discourse. On one side, this point in time means the onset of the female and feminist consolidation inside the literary mainstream marked by the publishing of the two novels written by women authors, on the other, it represents the ‘positioning’ of the feminist and Yugoslav literary traditions inside the very post-Yugoslav literary discourse. 12

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Again, to name only a few authors who came into focus in this period, though some appeared earlier: Aida Begić, Jasmila Žbanić, Elma Tataragić, Teona Strugar Mitevska, Milena Marković, Biljana Srbljanović, Ivana Sajko. The list is by no means exhaustive, including the authors whose poetry works were translated to German (from the authors already included in the analysis like Olja Savičević Ivančević and Tanja Stupar Trifunović, to Ana Ristović, Anja Golob, Tanja Bakić, and many others). I thank the poet and translator Cornelia Marks for her help in this matter.

1 Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent

The first aspect has to do with some principal and at the same time stereotyping practices of the reception and the literary canon. A ‘mainstreaming’ of a novel about the war by a woman author, namely Hotel Zagorje (2010, Engl. Hotel Tito, 2017) by Ivana Bodrožić highlighted a problematic link between the genre and gender.14 While a general “hierarchy of genres” (Đurić 2016) already leaves out the great corpus of poetry works outside the field of reception, it also affects the female authorship which often becomes visible precisely through this genre, not to mention the emancipatory potentials of poetry in feminist ‘consciousness rising’ (ibid.). A majority of the authors in this analysis initially published poetry (including some of the male authors like Slobodan Tišma), which is why the ‘mainstreaming’ has a double significance. It refers to the articulation of the experience hitherto reserved for the male authors – a war novel – suggesting also that poetry is almost exclusively a popular and recognised mode of women’s literary activity. On the other side, the novel – as what is predominantly perceived ‘as literature’ – marked our culture, becoming a necessary discourse or even a tool of women’s protrusion into the social sphere: As any society changes its social structure, changes its economic base, artefacts are re-created within it. Literary forms arise as one of the ways in which changing subjects create themselves as subjects within a new social context. The novel is the prime example of the way women start to create themselves as social subjects under bourgeois capitalism – create themselves as a category: women. (Mitchell 1990: 100) Likewise, genre of a novel is what marks this phase of (post-)Yugoslav literatures: “when we say post-Yugoslav, we also say a novel, we say capitalism” (Duda 2017: 49). In this sense, post-Yugoslav women authors’ writings about the war, their war novels is a double intrusion into the masculine/masculinist literary field, and it reshaped the literary scene.15 Another novel, Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju (2010, Engl. Farewell, Cowboy, 2015), narrativizes the post-Yugoslav “negative continuity with the socialist past” (Buden 2017: 350). Thematic intersections of gender, labour and inequality offer another perspective of the ‘democratic and capitalist transition’ and remind of the better (Yugoslav) past and socialist modernization that were interrupted by the war, criminal privatisation and impoverishment. The two authors of the younger generation disturbed the literary mainstream by introducing various tabooed topics, from the ‘better past’ of the socialist Yugoslavia, to 14 15

Though the novel has been published under the name Ivana Simić Bodrožić, throughout this paper I abide by the author’s current decision to use one last name. Besides the already mentioned study, Katja Kobolt in her 2006 text “Smrt u muzeju moderne umjetnosti Alme Lazarevske – ili: zašto se ratna literatura ženskih autora (spisateljica) ne recipira kao književnost o ratu” theorizes the relationship of the female authorship and war writing. See Bibliography.

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the critique of the ‘Homeland War’. What has been often interpreted as the ‘political incorrectness’ in their writing has been only intensified by the feminist articulation of their narratives. The second aspect is represented by Slobodan Tišma’s novel Bernardijeva soba (Bernardi’s Room, 2011), which not only ‘recollects’ the artistic practices of the Yugoslav Neo-avant-garde, but performs a vital link between the post-Yugoslav and Yugoslav arts. Importantly, this “performatively address[ed] historical praxis” (Buden 2017: 348) was made possible through the ‘passage’ between the two Neo-avantgardist authors, Slobodan Tišma and Judita Šalgo. Here is where another connotation of the female continent describes the historicization of post-Yugoslav literature: it symbolizes the connection the post-Yugoslav authors establish with the late (and dissolving) Yugoslav literary and artistic practices, specifically those feminist and Neo-avant-gardist. Through Judita Šalgo’s novel Put u Birobidžan these feminist and links between the late Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literatures have materialised. While all the three works shall be analysed in detail in the following chapters, they are here indicated as constituents of the exploratory timeline of the study. The year 2010 roughly represents the year in which the feminist literature reshaped the post-Yugoslav literary discourse. This happened over the narrated topics and the protrusion of the female authorship, but also over the post-Yugoslav’s literary discourse successful defining of its place within the history of the Yugoslav literature(s). The focus of the analysis are works published after 2010 in the post-Yugoslav states of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia, as those heuristically representing the post-Yugoslav literary field in which the language, history, past of the common country of Yugoslavia, together with the contradictions, failures and finally the Yugoslav wars in which Yugoslavia disintegrated are shared. While this choice certainly reproduces the inequalities existing in Yugoslavia – regarding the Serbo-Croatian, or Croato-Serbian language versus the languages of the ‘minorities’ and with this correlated cultural dominance – it as well reflects the reality of war the three countries have principally shared. Finally, while the chronology pertains to the fiction published in the specified period, the authors represent a transgenerational assemblage of writers born immediately after the World War II, to the last Yugoslav generations in the eighties, hence representing in reality a ‘trans-Yugoslav’ writers’ generation.

1 Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent

I 1.

Post-Yugoslav Literature: A Utopia and a Field Izraz ‘Jugoslavija’ je ušao u ovaj rječnik ne zato što se njime služe, već zato što se njime ne služe. Prije nego što definitivno precrtaju sa karte ono što ostaje od ove države, izbrisali su njeno ime iz jezika. (Petit glossaire de la guerre civile Yougoslave)16

As remarked in the introduction, the terminology around Yugoslavia and Yugoslav is – particularly in the post-Yugoslav period – instable, and the epigraph above indicates the status of this signifier along the process of its actual methodical elimination from use. This section is an overview of the circulation of the term ‘postYugoslav’ – particularly in the literary context – and the accompanying arguments for its usage that develop in spite of or parallel to this process. These arguments are informed both by the historic developments and what exists or is perceived as inherited and shared culture, and by the political re-appropriation and articulation of the term. Already a considerable bibliography and various regional projects reflect both the necessity of ‘addressing the historical praxes’ of Yugoslavia and with this process correlated interdisciplinary conceptualization of the (post-)Yugoslav present.17

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The term ‘Yugoslavia’ entered this dictionary not because it is being used, but because it is not. Before they definitely cross off the map what remains from this state, they erased its name from the language. (Stoyanne 1992: 126) This very dynamic theoretical and artistic production is disseminated throughout various academic, cultural and artistic initiatives and organizations, from The Centre for Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism founded in 2012 in Pula, and the Centre for Yugoslav Studies in Belgrade founded in 2016, to the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade (former Museum of History of Yugoslavia), and various internet portals and platforms like the Yuhistoria (https://www.yuhistorija.com) which has published texts of the prominent historians on the wide range of Yugoslav themes. The extensive bibliography on the topic is here exemplified by a short list of some of the relevant edited volumes, as they are good examples of the interdisciplinary, regional and often international collaborative projects: Zid je mrtav, živeli zidovi! Pad Berlinskog zida i raspad Jugoslavije (edited by Ivan Čolović, 2009); Mitovi epohe socijalizma (edited by Ljubiša Despotović et al., 2010); Komparativni postsocijalizam. Slavenska iskustva (edited by Maša Kolanović, 2013); After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land (edited by Radmila Gorup, 2013); Traumata der Transition: Erfahrung und Reflexion des jugoslawischen Zerfalls (edited by Boris Previšić et al., 2015); Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism (edited by Rory Archer et al., 2016); Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture (edited by Vlad Beronja et al., 2016); LGBT Activism and the Europeanisation of the Post-Yugoslav Space (edited by Bojan Bilić, 2016); Jugoslavija u istorijskoj perspektivi (edited by Latnika Perović et al., 2017); The

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From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent

To begin with, the relatively recent criticism of the phrase ‘post-Yugoslav’ as anachronistic, that is, an opting for the uninterrupted usage of Yugoslavia/Yugoslav, shows how studying Yugoslavia and what comes after is a vibrant academic and cultural field (Slapšak 2011b; Brebanović 2016, 2017; Levi 2019). While it now seems that this most apparent solution would be the most accurate, the authors continue switching the terminology, clearly showing the trouble with the comprehensive naming of the cultural production, or even a societal situation, experience of living and working as if there were no state borders.18 But, while until recently the post-Yugoslav literature alone appeared as a contested term and concept – often formulated as an open question19 – a few studies have lately evidenced that Yugoslav literature had never been a dominant or stable term either.20 Unlike the popular argument that Yugoslav literatures started ‘nationalizing’ after the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav literature(s) were variously defined from the beginnings of the common country. Also, together with the particularities of the history of Yugoslavism and Yugoslav culture, this process in reality reflects the dynamics of the universalist or particularistic paradigm in conceptualizing “literary cultures” in Eastern and Central Europe (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 2004). In the context of Yugoslav literature, this dynamic is reflected in the terminological and conceptual choice between a particular national literature (for example, Croatian literature), Yugoslav literature, or Yugoslav literatures (in plural), as a whole of different but in fact to the common literary field belonging national literatures (see S. Lukić 1972, J. Lukić 2018a, Vidulić 2017). Bibliography of the literary histories or the titles of the universities programmes in the period of Yugoslavia illustrate well this plurality. Hence, Yugoslav literature had in reality already held the status the post-Yugoslav literature assumes today, by being a transnational but also an integrationist literary and cultural project, and a discourse. While this fact could be read affirmatively, presenting the whole debate about the ‘validity’ of the (post-)Yugoslav literature as superfluous (Brebanović 2017), it can further support the arguments that neither Yugoslav nor post-Yugoslav literatures had ever really,

18

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Cultural Life of Capitalism in Yugoslavia: (post)Socialism and its Other (edited by Dijana Jelača et al., 2017a); Tranzicija i kulturno pamćenje (edited by Virna Karlić et al., 2017). Though possibly ironically, Brebanović still uses the qualifiers ‘post-Yugoslav’, or ‘ex-Yugoslav’ (Brebanović 2016: 122; 120), while Levi criticizes the term post-Yugoslav as “superficial” (Levi 2019: 95), but also resorts to the terms like ‘Yugoslav region’, ‘Yugoslav spaces’, confirming the complication of the naming in question. Postjugoslavenska književnost? (Postnikov, 2012); “‘Post-jugoslovenska književnost’? Ogledala i fantomi” (Rakočević, 2011). “Jugoslawische Literatur. Kurzer Abriss zur langen Geschichte eines produktiven Phantoms” (Vidulić, 2015); Jugoslovenska književnost: sadašnjost, prošlost i budućnost jednog spornog pojma/Yugoslav Literature: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Notion (edited by Adrijana Marčetić et al., 2019).

1 Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent

coherently existed (Vidulić 2017).21 The debate obviously arises from a not necessarily analogous relationship between the state of Yugoslavia and its culture, which is in reality the situation that has repeated in the post-Yugoslav period. Historians of Yugoslavia often point to the fact that the Yugoslav idea was principally communicated through the cultural socialization, restating that the Yugoslav culture predated the Yugoslav state itself (Djokić 2013; Stojanović 2015; Markovina 2017, 2018). In her text about the history of the Yugoslav idea, historian Dubravka Stojanović maintains that it was a rather strongly and comprehensively adopted idea, which is a fact that could help study the idea of togetherness in the Slavonic South, but also “the recent Yugo-nostalgia in many parts of the former Yugoslavia” (Stojanović 2015). The fact that Yugoslavism has been primarily conceptualized as culture is the point which is vital in understanding the post-Yugoslav cultural field, related to the ‘resilience’ of Yugoslav culture (Stojanović 2015), and Yugoslav society that outlived the state (Jovićević 2016).22 The state/culture opposition had been successfully theorized in the beginning of the nineties by the art historian and critic Jerko Denegri who introduced the term “Yugoslav cultural space”, observing “that the state and culture were not one and the same” (Djurić and Šuvaković 2003: xvi). Yet, the recent introduction of Bourdieu’s term cultural field in the post-Yugoslav literary studies better fits this peculiar dynamic, succeeding in addressing the actual relationships constructing the ‘cultural space’ which is not solely ‘culturally’, or ‘symbolically’ determined, but is the effect of “historical and material relations in production” (Solar 2012: 88). Positively, a culture “does not present itself in a prearranged economic, political and social context; it is in itself always already an economic fact, a political factor and a social product” (Buden et al. 2013: 8). Hence, the whole debate has been quite effectively resolved by reminding on the material conditions and links within a ‘cultural field’ as a space that integrates both the administrative, institutional actors and those who act outside of this framework, demonstrating that also Yugoslav literature itself functioned as the ‘field’. Bourdieu’s concept resolves precisely the limiting ‘static’ definition of post-Yugoslav literature (but also: Yugoslav literature), as the concept of the field infers dynamic and fluidity. The multiplicity and interconnectedness of all the agents in the field constituted on the multiple (interest, power, material) positions represent the “the science of the literary field” (Bourdieu 1993: 30). It “is a form of analysis situs which establishes that each position […] is subjectively defined by the system of distinctive properties by which it can be situated relative to other positions; that every 21

22

Relying on the works of prominent ‘Yugoslavists’ like S. Lukić, P. Matvejević, A. Barac and others, Vidulić in his other paper assesses unfavourably the ‘phantom’ literary project of the integrationist Yugoslav ideology (Vidulić 2015: 180–181), and expands his argument to affirm the insubstantiality of the post-Yugoslav literature too (ibid.: 182). Stojanović puts forward a “hypothesis that Yugoslavism was stronger than either of the two Yugoslav states, outliving them both” (Stojanović 2015).

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position, even the dominant one, depends […] on the other positions constituting the field” (ibid.). That literary field is a dynamic battleground of position-takings and positions defined by the possession and distribution of capital, that is, that the “literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also field of struggles” (ibid.) demystifies also the prevalent perceptions about the autonomy of literature, and its ‘organicistic’ appropriations (for example through the canonization of national literatures). The application of the Bourdieusian theoretical materialist paradigm in interpreting post-Yugoslav literature was initiated in the works of several authors from Croatia (Duda, Postnikov, Kosmos, Kreho), and results in the recent circulation of the phrase ‘post-Yugoslav (literary) field’.23 Limits of the national literature concepts stressed the need to use the apparatus with a more “analytical, i.e. operational value” (Duda 2017: 45): Analytical intention of the post-Yugoslav literary field construction, as the need to systematically approach the complex problematic of the recent literary configuration and the conditions of its production, is to a great extent the effect of the state of play of the national literary historiographies, i.e. their typical discourse, their historiographical practice, and, certainly, their reach. (Ibid.: 53) This approach helps in addressing the reality in which the contemporary literary works are produced, clearly distinguishing the essential difference – besides the administrative one – between Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literary practices: “when we say post-Yugoslav, we also say a novel, we say capitalism” (ibid.: 49). Moreover, incorporating the concept of the field into the analysis of post-Yugoslav literature helps in recognizing the dynamic process of this field construction, together with highlighting the fact that what we mean by ‘literature’ is not exhausted inside a literary text. Part of the post-Yugoslav field is the infrastructure of publishers (particularly relevant are those publishing cross-borders), regional literary festivals and literary awards, together with mostly online existing journals that publish literary reviews, which, again, exists despite the restrictive and ignoring official policies and regulations: The literary field is, together with writers and critics, shaped by the publishers. Publishing houses like Durieux or Belgrade-based Fabrika knjiga and RENDE are some of those responsible for reintroducing the authors from the broad postYugoslav space to readers coming from different [former Yugoslav] Republics. After the dissolution of the country, the grounds on which the broken cultural liaisons were re-established were the capitalist transition supported by the European integrations and the belief in the market. The other side of this narrative 23

Dean Duda, “Prema genezi i strukturi postjugoslavenskog književnog polja (bilješke uz Bourdieua)” (2017); Dinko Kreho, “O čemu govorimo kada govorimo o postjugoslavenskoj književnosti?” (2015).

1 Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent

is made by the cultural policies of the newly formed states, not interested to create the basic conditions for the circulation of books from other former Yugoslav Republics and make them available to readers. (Konjikušić 2016) While this unfavourable situation looks different in the world of internet sites and portals owing to which the post-Yugoslav literary field functions online uninterruptedly, the communication is actually virtually impossible to disrupt completely, because of the very nature of the field. Claims that commonly take shape of ‘Yugoslav-integrationist’, almost romantic visions of connections among people, are in fact empirical: there are “situations and contexts, like those linguistic or artistic ones, that are strong enough to ‘connect’ the territories” (Brebanović 2017: 61). The same logic helps define one’s own authorial identity against that which plainly and unquestionably belongs to what has been constituted as a national literature: I consider myself to be solely and exclusively a post-Yugoslav writer. The meaning of the post-Yugoslav literature reveals in the softness and flexibility of our identities, in our interfacing so to stay, and it is one of the strongest weapons against the ethnonational terror and a particularistic bigotry. Therefore, I don’t consider myself a Serbian writer, except if that refers to a partition behind which they can count my blood cells, since in fact there is no other criterion to defend such a categorization. (Vladimir Arsenijević in Konjikušić 2016) Moreover, theoreticians and critics who have discussed the notion of post-Yugoslav literature assent to the arguments that the motifs and themes in the works of postYugoslav authors “communicate” (Barzut 2012: 10), “relate to each other” (Crnković 2012: 5), are “impossible to understand outside the common context” (Kosmos 2015: 29), or represent a “mental geography” (Arsenijević 2010: 198). What is more, this awareness of the shared field is besides this contemporary, ‘horizontal’ spreading informed by the diachronic perspective of the Yugoslav past. One possible modus of its present existence is through the nostalgic memories, while on the other side there is a modus of historicization (Buden 2017), ‘making of the experiences’ (ibid.) that historically (and lastingly) connected Yugoslav peoples within the historical political entity of Yugoslavia. For this reason the insistence on the culture/state ‘split’ to an extent corresponds to the revisionist projects of the deligitimization of the SFRY. Precisely the role and the accomplishments of the SFRY as the institutionalized framework are at least interrelated, if not instrumental for the local cultural and artistic practices even nowadays. As will be shown next, Yugoslavia and its historicization are the ‘platform’ of the post-Yugoslav alternative, emancipatory social and cultural possibilities. Some of the constitutive properties and socio-economic and cultural accomplishments of Yugoslavia have been invoked in the writings of the post-Yugoslav researchers and authors to criticize the current political ambiance and suggest the

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necessity of relying upon these very traditions. One of the basic characteristics of the Yugoslav society relevant for the understanding of post-Yugoslav nationstates constituted on the principle of the ethnonational identity was that it had been built on the basis of the antifascist struggle in the Second World War (Suvin 2014; Markovina 2017; Bešlin, n.d.). This, namely, produced a specific new type of community, that is, a “non-identity-based, but emancipatory community” (Buden 2003), a “novel form of sociability” (Močnik 2018). Historian Dragan Markovina, among other researchers, sees also strong anti-antifascist agenda in the postYugoslav societies as a part of the deligimitization of the SFRY matrix. In nationalistic narratives the antifascist struggle is suspended since it is “entirely built on the narrative of the brotherhood and unity of the Yugoslav peoples” (Markovina 2017: 38-39), principally contradicting the ideas of the dominant ethnonational ideologies. Markovina indeed offers one possible definition of the post-Yugoslav culture as a ‘parallel’ discourse based precisely in antifascism, as a single chance of the antinationalist and liberal left to withstand the regressive local politics: “to build a new society, namely, parallel institutions which would regard the whole post-Yugoslav space as a single cultural space of the common heritage, particularly that of the antifascist provenance” (ibid.: 43). What also emerges as the critical element – as well articulated in opposition to the dominant societal matrices of the present time – are the emancipatory policies and practices of socialist Yugoslavia, a particular Yugoslav modernism which meant economic, cultural but also legal, institutional development and enhancement of the position of the Yugoslav peoples. The ‘post-socialist transition’ and the fundamental changes it generated, from privatization to pauperization and a general social and economic insecurity, are all executed by means of the greater antisocialist (hence anti-Yugoslav) discourse. As mentioned accomplishments represent the historic reality of one actually better past, Viktor Ivančić rightly points up the importance of the “organized dementia” (Ivančić 2017) as an institutionalized construction of the present-day narratives about the past. Not only that the (discursive) discontinuity is necessary in the legitimization of the new ethnonational states, but also the denunciation of the Yugoslav project which by all means was a ‘better yesterday’. The very openness and future-oriented discourse of the Yugoslav socialist project – and not merely romanticized mythemes – inform the Yugo-nostalgia as the nostalgia for future (Kreho 2017). A critical ‘materialist interpretation’ of the Yugoslav wars also emerges from this analytical perspective, changing the focus form ‘national hatreds’ to the transition of the socially-owned, or collective property in the process of the capitalist restauration. Clearly, “post-Yugoslav perspective politicizes” (Kreho 2015). Even if we consider it to represent “a nostalgia for […] a vision of a better SFRY, which never came into being” (Perica 2012: 251), this “political mythological Yugo-nostalgia can assume utopian dimensions and serve concrete emancipatory politics [stretching] all the

1 Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent

way from the total escapism, passivity, to the new engagement, activity” (Velikonja 2010: 132). Therefore, the “subversion is nowadays founded on togetherness” (Borka Pavićević in Komarčević 2016), and the “notion of Yugoslavia has been working as a platform for resistance” (Slapšak 2011b: 311). That is why the works of post-Yugoslav literature could be seen as offering a possibility of a “different kind of literature” (Postnikov 2012: 15). Yet, this different kind of literature, apparently produced exactly inside the ‘Yugoslav cultural sphere’ is what exists as different even before the post-Yugoslav period, as an alternative tradition, dubbed again by Denegri as “the second line”24 of the art produced in Yugoslavia: [F]irst is the decorative, vitalistic, and idealess moderate modernist art that became the official state of art of socialist Yugoslavia after the period of socialist realism. The second, the radical, experimental, and cosmopolitan art, […] existing on the margins of official culture: the avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, and postavant-garde phenomena of the twentieth century. (Djurić and Šuvaković 2003: xvi) The “second line” is alternative also in the sense that it is unorthodox, or even marginal, comparable to the status of the Yugoslav avant-gardist art practices that remained outside of the dominant culture: [I]nformation on avant-garde movements has not been integrated into the dominant discourse of national culture in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, BosniaHerzegovina, Macedonia, or Montenegro. This is why […] the problem of the avant-garde can be defined as a problem of impossible histories and impossible transfers of art to culture in historical Yugoslavia (1918–1991). (Šuvaković 2003: 6) Again, a ‘Yugoslav cultural sphere’ could be seen as the sphere in which precisely Yugoslav (Neo-)avant-gardist artistic trajectories materialize, clarifying also a continuity the post-Yugoslav literature creates with the Yugoslav (Neo-)avant-gardist arts. While already a few authors theorized avant-gardist continuities in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav period, referring to stylistic and ideological propensities of the artistic practices,25 the already-mentioned link between the two novels – 24 25

Though the use of the term “the other line” would also be fitting (“druga linija”). One of the examples belonging to the Yugoslav literary historiography is Sveta Lukić’s interpretation of the link between the post-war Yugoslav fiction and historical avant-gardes (Lukić 1972). A ‘conscious’ act of establishing literary continuities among the Yugoslav Neo-avantgardes and the post-Yugoslav writings is present in Vladimir Kopicl’s 2003 text “Writings of Death and Entertainment: Textual Body and (De)composition of Meaning in Yugoslav Neoavant-garde and Post-avant-garde Literature, 1968–1991”. Jelena Milinković in her 2010 article on contemporary poetry written by women conceptualizes its Yugoslav (Neo-)avant-gardist foundations (Milinković 2010). In the already cited 2017 article, Predrag Brebanović discusses

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Bernardijeva soba and Put u Birobidžan – reveals the new possibility of historicizing the literary avant-gardes inside the post-Yugoslav context, and by virtue of it, the historicization of the post-Yugoslav literature itself. The stated feminist aspect of this link is the other end of this historicization, presenting the post-Yugoslav literature also as a feminist discourse, which will be further clarified in the following section. However, this link emerges from one particular relationship towards the past, and towards temporality more generally. A true modern society – in the history of Yugoslav peoples represented by the society of the SFRY – “was believed to have been born in an emancipatory historical event and to be heading toward a better future” (Buden 2017: 346). But in the present-time “national post-socialism […] the phantasm of tradition dominates” (Šuvaković in Radović 2005: 65). Unlike this commemorative interest in the past (Buden 2017), the past could be actualized, in the Benjaminian sense of the word: [O]ne could speak of the increasing concentration (integration) of reality, such that everything past (in its time) can acquire a higher grade of actuality than it had in the moment of its existing. How it marks itself as higher actuality is determined by the image as which and in which it is comprehended. […] To approach, in this way, ‘what has been’ means to treat it not historiographically, as heretofore, but politically, in political categories. (Benjamin 2002: 392) The extent to which the fiction circumscribed by this research succeeds in “performatively addressing historical praxis” (Buden 2017: 348) of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav past can become a necessary “memory-knowledge [established] as history” (Brebanović 2017: 61). Hence, whereas in the present-day culture of commemoration “[t]opicality is excluded” (Šuvaković in Radović 2005: 65),26 the ‘past as history’ is the way of establishing a continuity with the Yugoslav past. The (post-Yugoslav) culture is “the past in its presence, topicality, uncertainty, openness. It is the past beyond its difference from the present and the future.” (Buden et al. 2013: 8). In this sense, the female continent as the figure of this research refers to the (Neo-) avantgardist artistic and social imagination of a utopia, together with its negative assessments (as it shall be shown in the Chapter VI).

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the concept of Yugoslav literature, offering at once the arguments for the post-Yugoslav literature constitution, by looking at the avant-gardist and revolutionary properties of Miroslav Krleža work (in his 2006 study Podrumi marcipana: čitanje Bore Ćosića he also theorizes the theses). Again, together with mentioning some of the individual contributors, two projects in particular are important for archiving and producing new knowledges about the links among the contemporary artistic production and the Yugoslav (Neo-)avant-garde arts: the virtual Museum of Avantgarde (https://www.avantgarde-museum.com/en/museum/collection/) and the collective Centre for New Media kuda.org. (https://www.kuda.org/). “Aktuelnost je isključena.”

1 Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent

By establishing this critical link, post-Yugoslav literature ceases being a provisional and even a problematic concept, but represents a relatively constant perpetuation of Yugoslav art, comparable to the “elusive and impossible” history of the Yugoslav avant-gardes (Šuvaković 2003: 5).

I 2.

A Feminist Framing of the post-Yugoslav Literary Field Recimo, dakle, da se osjećam post-nacionalnom književnicom. Za moj snažan otpor prema mome vlastitom etničkom svrstavanju u književnosti kriva su dva faktora. Jedan je nacionalizam i ustroj književnosti koji se ne razlikuje mnogo od ustroja novih postjugoslavenskih država. To su u principu organizacije slične mafijaškim zajednicama. Dakle, dok god si netko uzima pravo da ugura u književnost mamu, tatu i tetku, a izgura nekog drugog zato što je ‘Srbin’, ‘komunjara’, ‘partizančina’ i slično – ja takvoj zajednici ne mogu i ne želim pripadati. Drugi je razlog rodni: to je zajednica u kojoj vladaju muškarci: Hrvati u hrvatskoj književnosti, Srbi u srpskoj. Pitam vas: zašto bih onda ja, kao spisateljica, hrlila da pripadam takvoj književnoj zajednici? (Dubravka Ugrešić)27

In her text on the transnationalism of post-Yugoslav literature and its feminist perspective Jasmina Lukić proposes that a book that marks “both the end of Yugoslav literature, and the beginning of post-Yugoslav literature is a collective project

27

Let’s say I feel like a post-national author. There are two reasons I strongly oppose being grouped under ethnic criteria. One is the nationalism and the organization of literature not very different from the organization of the new post-Yugoslav states. These are actually organizations similar to mafia communities. Therefore, as long as someone feels entitled to take in their mom, dad, aunt, and throw out somebody because they are ‘Serbian’, ‘a commie’, ‘a damn partisan’ and the like – I cannot and will not belong to that community. The other reason is gender: it is the community ruled by men: Croats in Croatian literature, Serbs in Serbian. I ask: why would I, as a woman writer, rush to be a member of such a literary community? (Dubravka Ugrešić in Konjikušić 2016)

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From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent

and a book which undermines any kinds of borders and divisions, from state to generic ones” (Lukić 2018a: 336), the Vjetar ide na jug i okreće se na sjever/Vetar gre, proti poldnevu in se obrača proti polnoči (1994, The Wind Blows toward the South and Shifts toward the North). A correspondence between four Yugoslav women writers, Rada Iveković, Biljana Jovanović, Maruša Krese and Radmila Lazić in the midst of Yugoslav dissolution and war is not only a collective, but also a transnational book, considering the history of its publishing, but also linguistically and politically: “Mi smo uvek bili transrepublikanci, transnacionalci, tada se to zvalo biti Jugoslovenkom” (We were always trans-republicans, transnationals, back then it was called being Yugoslav; Iveković in Jovanović et al. 1994: 17).28 Moreover, for its “subversively open structure and mixture of languages, the book can easily be seen as a local version of Anzaldua’s Borderlands, a mestiza text which promotes mestiza consciousness during a time when monolithic and simplistic readings of identity overtake a region already plunged into a series of local wars” (Lukić 2018a: 336). Besides making a clear pacifist and anti-nationalist statement, the authors also publicised women’s involvement in the nationalist politics and discussed the problematic female ‘emancipation’ enabled by it (Iveković in Jovanović et al. 1994: 89; 95; 195). Moreover, a specific feminist discourse of the book redefined the very notion of authorship. While on one hand the collective writing shifts the focus from the question of authorship to the possibilities and forms of communication, it deconstructs the singular, universalist, centred and in reality culturally male-coded notion of authorship. The authorship as the effect of communication is enabled by the figure of a listener, without whom the story-telling could not take place (Felman and Laub 1992; Anderson 2006). The fulfilment of the precondition of telling a trauma, it is as well a reciprocal and plural conception of telling a story, of being an author. This principle is executed even beyond the four authors’ collective ‘correspondence’ authorship, by inserting the texts of some of the Yugoslav artists and authors like Jelena Trpković, Mira Furlan, Stevan Tontić, or incorporating various anti-war proclamations, but also practical instructions (i.e. in case of arresting the anti-war rebels).29 The relationship towards authorship as collective and collaborative, writing/narrating as the activity inseparable from listening/responding, anti-nationalist and anti-war communication, together with the all-embracing principles of Yugoslavism and feminism actually indicate an alternative public, or the feminist counterpublic, from which the very post-Yugoslav cultural and literary discourse

28 29

The book was first published by the German Suhrkamp in 1993 as Briefe von Frauen über Krieg und Nationalismus (Women’s Letters on War and Nationalism), and a year later in Belgrade. “Upustvo za ponašanje pobunjenika protiv rata u slučaju hapšenja” (Jovanović et al. 1994: 100).

1 Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent

emerged.30 Jasmina Lukić in her 2018 interview also reminded of the anti-war and anti-nationalist character of the women studies grounded in Belgrade during the war in 1992, and in 1995 in Zagreb, adding that precisely this feminist engagement was formative for the civil scene (Lukić 2018b). Hence, the Vjetar ide na jug is, while being the last and first book of Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literatures, the book which connects the histories of Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav feminisms. A utopian female continent indicates also the significance of Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav feminisms in identifying the links between patriarchy, nationalism and war, and the overall impact this made on the creation of this alternative public space. Feminist anti-nationalist and pacifist discourse is an integral part of this space in which “networks and alliances beyond national borders [and] gender-conscious ‘new literacy’” (Lukić 2018a: 335) are created. These ‘feminist literacies’ have been incorporated in the argumentation and represent the conceptual background of this analysis. The backbones of the history of socialist Yugoslavia’s feminisms are the foundation of the AFŽ (Women’s Antifascist Front) during the Second World War and its dismissal in 1953, a threshold year 1978 when the first feminist conference in the socialist country Drug-ca žena (Comrade Woman) was organized and a henceforth progressing of feminist theory, arts and activism.31 Nevertheless, as regards the topic of this research, the feminist anti-nationalist and pacifist discourse articulated in the late 1980s by the Yugoslav feminist activists and theoreticians is the most relevant and corresponds to the way already Virginia Woolf in her Three Guineas (1938) linked “the male domination of the cultural heritage with exploitation, violence and war” (Spender 1997: 24). Yugoslav feminists voiced and publicized the wartime sexual violence, theorizing also the general gendered discourse of nation and nationalism in the beginning and in the course of war: In most of the writing of former Yugoslavia’s feminist theory the reality of war and the discourse of nationalism is gender identified [...]. What also runs like a thread through these writings is the need for these feminist authors to ground themselves in the sanity of peace, absolute rejection of any nationalism, and a reminder of multicultural frameworks of the former Yugoslavia. (Duhaček 1998: 134).32

30 31 32

The concept of the feminist counterpublic has been recently employed in the study of the interwar periodicals by Stanislava Barać (Barać 2015). The period ‘in-between’ the removal of the AFŽ and the Drug-ca conference does not represent a ‘break’, but is simply still not well researched. The persecution of Jelena Lovrić, Rada Iveković, Slavenka Drakulić, Vesna Kesić and Dubravka Ugrešić in 1992 known as the Witches from Rio ‘case’ is the consequence of their publicizing of the war violence and war rape.

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The bibliography of the feminist interpretations of war, nationalism, violence, patriarchy and break-up of Yugoslavia is quite extensive, and it is for this reason difficult to select a few among the numerous authors of this outstandingly productive theoretical, political and activist corpus of knowledge. A small excerpt from the bibliography and a few prominent names of the ‘new Yugoslav feminists’ – referring to the Yugoslav Neofeminism articulated in the mid-seventies – who provided critical contributions on the topics represent here the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav feminist discourse: Žarana Papić, Lydia Sklevicky, Biljana Jovanović, Jasmina Tešanović, Vesna Kesić, Rada Iveković, Svetlana Slapšak and many others.33 Nevertheless, reminiscent of Dubravka Žarkov’s suggestion that a connection between the anti-war and feminist engagement is not necessarily neither ideologically grounded nor politically appropriate,34 Tatjana Rosić maintains that “the interests of patriarchy are often represented as the interests of the nation” (Rosić 2015: 243). Part of the war technology was “the gendered dimension in the intensification of ethnic conflict and the incitement to violence” (Kesić 2001: 315), that is “gendering [of] the war propaganda” (ibid.: 315). Discussing the “patriarchal management of the crisis” (Slapšak 2009: 288), Svetlana Slapšak suggests that the “presence of misogyny in the public discourse [is] also an important sign of the cultural readiness to war, or at least a hint of the war culture” (ibid.: 292). Svetlana Slapšak is one of the most prominent proponents of understanding Yugoslav nationalisms and war as correlated to misogynist and patriarchal culture, while she is as well one of the most important theoreticians of the post-Yugoslav discourse. By building on

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While this by no means exhaustive list is just a part of the bibliography spread throughout this paper, the texts have been also purposefully selected to display the temporal and thematic scope of the continuous production of the feminist knowledge on the topic: Rada Iveković: “Women, nationalism and war: ‘Make love not war’” (1993), “The Fiction of Gender Constructing the Fiction of Nation: On How Fictions Are Normative, and Norms Produce Exceptions” (2005); Žarana Papić: “Women in Serbia: Post-Communism, War and Nationalist Mutations” (1998), Feminists Under Fire: Exchanges Across War Zones (editor, 2003); Svetlana Slapšak: War Discourse, Women’s Discourse: Essays and Case Studies from Yugoslavia and Russia (editor, 2000), “Posleratni rat polova. Mizoginija, feministička getoizacija i diskurs odgovornosti u postjugoslovenskim društvima” (2009); Vesna Kesić: “Muslim Women, Croatian Women, Serbian Women, Albanian Women…” (2002), Žene obnavljaju sjećanja (editor, 2003); Jasmina Tešanović: “Women and Conflict: A Serbian Perspective” (2003), Dizajn Zločina, Suđenje škorpionima (2009). I expand this restricted choice of texts by suggesting the titles of a few significant edited volumes: Gender and Identity: Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe (edited by Jelisaveta Blagojević et al., 2006); Neko je rekao feminzam? Kako je feminizam uticao na žene XXI veka (edited by Adriana Zaharijević, 2007 a); Feminist Critical Interventions: Thinking Heritage, Decolonising, Crossings (edited by Biljana Kašić et al., 2013). Ana Miškovska Kajevska’s 2017 study Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s (New York & London: Routledge) contributed greatly to the debate on the anti-war activism, feminism and nationalism in the dissolving Yugoslavia.

1 Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent

Simon de Beauvoir’s writings on patriarchy after the Second World War, Slapšak interpreted the present day historical revisionism in all former Yugoslav Republics as being in fact directed against the historical achievements of women’s struggle as one of the most important social transformations of the time, “precisely because it represented a substantial symbol of the changes generally” (Slapšak 2009: 285). Therefore, parallel with the analysis of the Yugoslav wars, the revision of Yugoslav history is by way of feminist analysis seen as an aspect of the same project of marginalization of women and their struggle, and the retraditionalization of the society, together or by means of transforming the notions of ‘femaleness’, and ‘femininity’. Likewise, perceptions of ‘masculinity’ and the actual destabilization of its traditional properties are interrelated with the principal societal processes: “Isn’t the whole project of the rehabilitation of a wounded masculinity just another in a line of regional state and cultural projects, aimed at silencing and whitewashing of historical memory, hence representing the postponement of the confrontation.” (Rosić 2014: 25). Dubravka Ugrešić’s epigraph above shows how this interrelationship of nationalism and patriarchy reproduces in the cultural field. While she identifies ethnonational and male prerequisites of post-Yugoslav masculinist ‘official’ literatures, Olja Savičević Ivančević illustrates this dynamics in the concrete example of the curriculum: A single woman author in four years of high school – that was the curriculum. At the university the number of the integral works by women authors we read pushed as far as four or five. In that moment you either agree to it, or the thought of the experience of the half of the world’s population which is mainly lost, makes you feel restless. (Savičević Ivančević in Andrijašević 2016)35 While the declared focus of the study has been the last decade of the century, the two exceptions from the temporal focus illustrate well this process of exclusion. The uneven, sporadic, delayed presence in the literary scene of the two authors – Ildiko Lovas and Snežana Andrejević – identify quite accurately the character of the mainstream literature. A Serbian-Hungarian author, Ildiko Lovas’ works were published in Serbian in the interval between 2005 and 2012, while the other author, Snežana Andrejević, wrote the first version of her future novel already with the outburst of war, but the full text was published first in 2007. The works of Ildiko Lovas are silenced for their multiple ‘minority’ discourses – from the minority language they were written on, to the feminist take on the (post-)Yugoslav history, whereas the name of Snežana Andrejević remains barely known in the literary scene despite 35

“Samo jedna autorica u četiri godine srednje škole – takav je bio program. Na faksu je broj autorica čija smo djela čitali integralno dogurao do četiri-pet. Tad ili pristaneš na to ili ti misao da je iskustvo polovice čovječanstva uvelike izgubljeno ne da mira.”

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From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent

the fact that she wrote a unique text on the Yugoslav wars, refracted in the theme of female authorship. Nevertheless, her absence from the literary scene is possibly a part of a conscious reproduction of the female authorship’s invisibility. This kind of play suggest that “literary production is gender ambiguous” (Lovell 1990: 84), meaning that the lines between ‘female’ and ‘male’ authorship could be more porous than it seems. Literary production as “deeply ambivalent” (ibid.: 83) discourse is an experimental space in which the sexual difference, that is the female difference exists, or ‘becomes’ past its ‘negative identity’. French feminists “evoked and revoked the tradition of Western thought, by seeing the female Otherness and the negative attributes that accompany it” (Čale Feldman and Tomljenović 2012: 57). Luce Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference has been developed precisely along the recognition of the absence of the actual sexual difference, and the existence of the domination of the philosophic logos that “stems in large part from its power to reduce all others to the economy of the Same. […] And, in its greatest generality perhaps, from its power to eradicate the difference between the sexes in systems that are selfrepresentative of a ‘masculine subject’” (Irigaray 1985: 74.). The aim of the ‘politics of sexual difference’ is “to change the symbolic order, and accompanying social practices, to create a positive feminine subject-position.” (Stone 2016: 874). Hence, the feminine place of the “no-body” (Braidotti 1994: 47) can be also “a point of view (a site of différence) from which phallogocentric concepts and controls can be seen through and taken apart” (Jones 1981: 248). The concept of sexual difference is a basis to conceptualize the female subjectivity, hence the female authorship and its relationship to the language and the symbolic order, determined by the (Lacanian) phallus (Rosić 2015: 246). Becoming the author – in de Beauvoir’s sense of becoming a woman, but also in the sense of a debated Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming as “the affirmation of the positivity of difference, meant as a multiple and constant process of transformation” (Braidotti 1994: 111) – is the process this analysis follows. This becoming relates to the women’s occupying of the literary scene and the ‘authority’ of a writer, traditionally imagined as a masculine figure. Nevertheless, it also means transgressing the notorious “anxiety of authorship” (Gilbert and Gubar), and thereby instituting the female authorial figure as the sovereign creative, and narrating subject. This struggle is not only a theme, but a textual procedure thorough which the writings analysed in this research materialize. This theme and a process are noticeable initially through the authorial status of narrators, their writer’s vocation, as a rule accompanied by the mentioned anxiety in the form of a writer’s block, or discernible on the level of the diegesis, as an undecided and non-authoritative narrating. Importantly, the modern breakthrough of women into the literary sphere is inseparable from the transformation of the very understanding of ‘femininity’ and the already mentioned masculine figure of an author: “Vocation – the will to write – nonetheless required a genuine tran-

1 Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent

scendence of female identity. Victorian women were not accustomed to choosing a vocation; womanhood was a vocation in itself.” (Showalter 1977: 21) Regular usage of the term ‘autofiction’ in this paper owes to this process of self-examination, almost tangible process of the separation/integration of the author and the narrating self, as one of the critical properties of the women’s writing. The autofiction, as the procedure of narration, that is the discourse which comprises the tension between the reality and fiction is the term used to reference the ambiguity of a possible autobiographical inscription, yet without ever finally secluding it. By quoting Kosinski, Linda Hutcheon restates that the term autofiction is “‘fiction’ because all memory is fictionalizing; ‘auto’ because it is […] ‘a literary genre, generous enough to let the author adopt the nature of his fictional protagonist – not the other way around’” (Hutcheon 2004: 10). While it is on one hand a mark of the discourse’s ambiguity, the autofiction is the sign of the author’s presence. It is the tool that can help organize fictional texts in an expressly political way. The fact that the narratorsprotagonists are authors, writers by vocation upholds the need to open the literary text for the public speech about the injustice, but also marginalization and silencing. Technically performed as the “homodiegetic” narration (Genette), autofiction is “the fiction I have decided, as a writer, to give myself of myself, including, in the full meaning of the term, the analysis experience, not only as regards the subject but also the production of the text.” (Doubrovsky in Bouzonviller 2015:148, fn 2). The figure of an autofictional narrator is essential for the post-Yugoslav fiction: the possibility offered by ‘practicing autofiction’ signals the need for a public space of speech and communication, and a (narrative, narratological) “platform for resistance”. Nevertheless, the concept of autofiction is related to the broadly discussed problem of autobiography inside the feminist criticism. While the autobiography provided the “privileged space for women to discover new forms of subjectivity” (Anderson 2006: 119), the psychoanalytic and poststructuralist authors “instead insisted that subject did not pre-exist the process of its formation within language” (ibid.). On the other side, by reminding of the names of the feminist journals and books (they by rule involve a voice of voicing) Wilson negotiates the idea that “if there is a typical literary form of feminism it is the fragmented, intimate form of confessional, personal testimony, autobiography, the diary” (Wilson 1990: 182). Nevertheless, Wilson also asks whether the testimonies could and should be really taken as transparent and straightforward evidence of an experience, while Cowie argues that the novel itself as a first person realistic narrative allows identification with the genre of autobiography. This has both emancipatory and limiting effects: [A] form which is ideologically appropriate to feminism; authors see it as a way of telling women’s story for the first time in an undisguised voice. The result has been an identification of author with protagonist, and of both with ‘women’,

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a result emphasized when commercial publishers use it as a marketing device, selling women’s writing as subversive, sexual autobiography – the autobiography of a gender. The attempt has been to present women for the first time as active, speaking subject; the effect has been to obscure as well as mystify the activity of displacement present in all forms of imaginative writing. (Cowie 1990: 127) Clearly, first person narration is not in itself emancipatory, though it is often theorized as the epochal opening of the literary space for the female voices. On the contrary, besides the problematic ‘sexualizing of the genre’, it can function as a substitute for the actual social and political transformation: [T]he woman speaker, deliberately collapsed into the ‘real’ writer, is represented as an author with writer’s block, seeking both sexual gratification and release into prose. A double triumph is equated with liberation. Neither writing nor sexual pleasure as valorised activities are quer ied in their relation to social and political meanings. Both are complacently offered as individual satisfactions, and silently substituted for a feminist politics. (Cowie 1990: 127) Moreover, while some authors make a clear distinction between feminist politics and women’s experience36 , the other maintain that we cannot completely separate one from another, for feminism could not “take women to be a dispensable category” (Barrett 1990: 163). This dynamic in a specific way reverberates in the context of the market, where “the notion ‘women’s writing’ defines all those literary texts written by women and is primarily used as a market category” (Grdešić 2015). An easy analogy of ‘genre and gender’ prompts a ghettoization of literature written by women, comparable to other ‘minority’ literatures: a heterogeneous space is conceptualized as a single genre (ibid.).37 Coming back to autobiography, autofiction seems to be the possibility that resolves the ‘trouble between the autobiography and the feminist subject’ (Anderson 2006). The concept of autofiction suspends the often misleading autobiographical reading of fiction, but leaves the narrative space open for the first person accounts. The subject constructed though the procedure of autofiction is the ‘speaking subject’, someone who has a voice, which is why the ‘autofictional vocation’ of the fe-

36

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“Feminism can never be the product of the identity of women’s experiences and interests – there is no such unity. Feminism must always be the alignment of women in a political movement with particular political aims and objectives. It is a grouping unified by its political interests, not by its common experiences.” (Coward 1980: 63) Grdešić further explains: “It is enough to look at Wikipedia, Amazon, or even Goodreads and understand that the women writers are placed in special categories: ‘women’s’, ‘women’s writing’, ‘women’s fiction’. The only authors not grouped under any of the categories labelled by an identity aspect are male white hetero cis writers. There are no, for example, categories such as ‘men’s writing’, ‘white fiction’, ‘straight fiction’, ‘cis writing’.” (Grdešić 2015)

1 Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent

male (and feminist) narrators in the analysed fiction is as a rule that of a writer, as the ‘privileged narrator’. Yet, this position materializes in different forms, from the ‘regular’ anxiety of authorship, to the narrator’s split (for example, by altering grammatical gender in the work of Snežana Andrejević), or complete suspension of the conventional narrator (in Luka Bekavac’s fiction), but also manifests as the narrators’ inquiry into their gender or sexual identities, often felt as alien, or in the process of transformation (Slobodan Tišma). Nevertheless, the recognition and distinction of the female difference, female subjectivity, ironically coincides with the poststructuralist ‘removal’ of the universalist subject. But, then the question “what kind of political and moral accountability is possible within a feminist position that works without a notion of a universal subject or stable self?” (Butler 1992) must be asked. Judith Butler in her writings resolved this paradoxical situation by taking on “the radical position that […] the absence and the dismantling of the fixed categories does not lead to the collapse of the whole political project of feminism, but discloses the new meaning of the political” (Zaharijević 2006: 70). Instead of the totalizing categories, for Butler ‘a woman’ exists only in plural, not anchored, “a never fully accomplished project” (ibid.: 69). A feminist standpoint itself is never complete but is rather a “flexibly developing standpoint that can handle whatever emerges in the process of eliminating sexism” (Moi, 1989: 132). Feminist reading of literature enables avoiding the attributed, ‘inherent’ feministic characteristics of texts, transferring the focus from this question to a relational link between a work of fiction and its possible interpretations. This shift from the characteristics of a ‘feminist text’38 to a feminist reading helps also resolve the ambiguity of the autobiographical inscription. Interpreting Barth’s ‘death of the author’ as an actual ‘birth of the reader’, Grosz theorizes this position from the feminist perspective as decisive in the deconstruction of the patriarchal and masculine texts. The creative advancement of the reader enabled the “feminist appropriations and recontextualizations” (Grosz 1995: 16) of any text, no matter how ‘patriarchal’ it might be. This also explains why the privileged text of the feminist analysis are the phallocentric texts of Lacan, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Marx. For: “Any text can be read from a feminist point of view, that is, from the point of view that brings out the text’s alignment with, participation in, and subversion of patriarchal norms.” (Grosz 1995: 16) 38

Elisabeth Grosz distinguishes three types of such texts: “And when I refer sometimes to ‘feminist texts’, sometimes to ‘feminine texts’, and sometimes to ‘women’s texts’, I am purposely being vague. Exploring the relations between the ‘women’s texts’ (texts written by women, largely for women), ‘feminine texts’ (those written from the point of view of feminine experience or in a style culturally designated as feminine), and ‘feminist texts’ (those which selfconsciously challenge the methods, objects, goals, or principles of mainstream patriarchal cannons) is precisely my purpose here.” (Grosz 1995: 11)

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Feminist reading is the ‘oppositional reading’ (Stuart Hall),39 effectuated by the poststructuralist conception of a standpoint which is “not, strictly speaking, a position, but rather a critical interrogation of the exclusionary operations by which ‘positions’ are established” (Butler 1992). While Kate Millet in the beginning of the seventies theorized “the social, institutional and personal power relations between the sexes” (Moi, 1989: 118) as sexual politics, refocus of the feminist theory to gender also enabled the constant questioning and awareness of “the other categories of difference that structure our lives and texts, just as theorizing gender emphasizes the connection between feminist criticism and other minority critical revolutions” (Showalter 1997: 229). ‘Other categories of difference’ is what the feminist reading of post-Yugoslav literature is clearly also aimed at. In the same way the feminist criticism is not “single and uniform, given and forever established, systemic, let alone normative” (Čale Feldman and Tomljenović 2012: 19), there is “no autonomous set of the regulatory terms, operations and interest of the feminist critique” (ibid.).

I 3.

Summary

The works selected represent a contemporary post-Yugoslav literary production, and more concretely those ‘crossover texts’ that constitute the post-Yugoslav literature as a feminist discourse. The works have been also decided on by the specific kind of reception, taking into account the literary prizes, reviews, presence in the regional network of publishers, but also the reoccurring underrepresentation of some of the authors and their works. The analysis opens with the three stories by a Serbian-Hungarian author Ildiko Lovas (b. 1967) in the following Chapter II. The three stories represent the most common modifications of time: Yugoslavia as a nostalgic memory, when it takes form of a chronotopic figuration, traumatic remembering of Yugoslavia and a disillusioned present-day narrative. A critical feature of the narratives is that all three temporalities are cut across by the event of the female authorship, as an (autofictional) precondition of the story being told in the first place. Obstacles to this authorship, but also its realization which is meaningful only when it articulates a transnational, diasporic, minority spaces are the themes of this fiction. Finally, Lovas explores the possibilities and limits of the écriture féminine, together with the importance of not only writing, but listening to a story one must tell. Chapter III is an experimental analysis of the three novels as the post-Yugoslav écriture féminine. While the textual presence of the female author, that is, the aut39

Opposed to the ‘hegemonic reading’, this kind of reading relates also to other traditions of non-conformist reading, like Ricoeur’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, or Althusser’s ‘symptomatic reading’.

1 Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent

ofictional narrator is the essential aspect of these fictional realities, the authors respond differently to the contests of the écriture féminine. Death of the mother, and the father unfold as a Cixousian precondition of writing. Tanja Stupar Trifunović’s (b. 1977) novel could be read as a textbook of the écriture féminine – its rhetoric, the figure of the mother, romance narrative and a hybrid, ‘fluid’ narration complete this ‘anachronistic’ second-wave text. Tea Tulić’s (b. 1978) narrator focuses on the mother and the female family as a reverberation of the ‘sisterhood’ as that non-hierarchical ‘horizontal’ relationship among women. In her novel Tulić touches upon the space of the semiotic as the source of the female authorship and the role of the mother in mastering the usage of language. Finally, Ivana Bodrožić’s (b. 1982) warnovel narrativizes the trauma of war and father’s death, reflected in the coming of age story. The novel explores the dynamic among fictional and autobiographic writing that is relevant for the feminist debates about the emancipatory possibilities of the self-narratives. Novels of Luka Bekavac (b. 1976) and Snežana Andrejević (b. 1956) are contrastively read in the Chapter IV in order to show, on one side, the continuities among the seemingly disconnected literary texts that in fact structure a single literary field, and on the other the interruption in the reception and general position of women authors in the literary mainstream. The subject of the female voice remerges as the possibility of communicating the past, but also as a not less puzzling relationship between this voice and the (belonging) body. While the stress on the diegetic narration enables the analysis of the ‘gendered story-teller’, the ‘mimesis of war’ in the novels by the two authors unveils the correlation between war and gender/sex. Finally, the avant-gardist perception of temporality and history defines the possibilities of narrativizing the past in the first place, indicating along the way the links among Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav writing. Chapters V and VI are also comparatively structured, but in the way which would show alternative possible answers to the same question about ‘what to do with the past’? It seems that the past, which haunts the protagonists in the postYugoslav fiction, is here finally confronted. In the case of Olja Savičević Ivančević (b. 1974) it is the interruption of a ‘normalizing’ narrative of the transition, an homage to the socialist Yugoslavia but also the envisioning of some kind of a utopian future. Going back and forth through the time unfolds as, again, a necessary element on the way to the narrator’s authorial, bodily and feminist emancipation. Slobodan Tišma (b. 1946) performs the connection to the artistic practices of the Yugoslav Neo-avant-garde, he himself was the protagonist of, instituting a link between the past and the present beyond a mere commemoration. This act activated the historicization of the very post-Yugoslav literature as a part of a broader avant-gardist, alternative or also leftist literary practice. Tišma touches upon principal questions of the literary history and canon and offers an answer to the question who writes ‘for, in place of, as’ women?

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II Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction Sećanja, uspomene su najprijemčivije i od toga treba u estetskom smislu najviše očekivati. Kada čovek oseća radost a ne zna zašto, uzrok uvek leži negde duboko u prošlosti. Puškin je rekao da sve što je prošlo, lepo je. Ama baš sve. (Slobodan Tišma)1   Jer ako se o ovim zločinima sada ne bude naglas govorilo, ovako kako ja sada ovdje govorim, govorila je profesorica filozofije, budite sigurni da će se ponoviti, puno prije negoli se tome uopće budete mogli nadati! Tako je govorila profesorica, a potom su se svi smijali i namigivali jedni drugima kao da su poslušali dobar vic pomalo sramotna sadržaja. (Tatjana Gromača)2   Jučer. Jučer je naravno Jugoslavija. (Svetlana Slapšak)3

1

2

3

Recollections, memories are highly amenable and this very quality can grant aesthetical effects. When a person feels joy and knows not why, the reason is always somewhere deep in the past. Pushkin said everything that went by is beautiful. Absolutely everything. (Tišma 2014: 172) If these crimes are not addressed out loud here, the way I’m doing now, a professor of philosophy used to say, be sure that they would repeat, sooner than you could expect! Thus spoke the professor, and then everybody laughed and winked at each other as if they’d heard a good and lascivious joke. (Gromača 2014: 90–91) Yesterday. Yesterday is of course Yugoslavia. (Slapšak 2011a: 66)

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From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent

The dynamics between the ‘Yugoslav idea’ and the Yugoslav state, and on the other side the instability, or openness of the definition of the Yugoslav literature(s) brought up in the beginning of this paper, inform and shape the post-Yugoslav literary field. Nevertheless, the format of Yugoslavia’s appearance in the writings of the post-Yugoslav authors is also defining the discourse; it is an aspect of a literary post-Yugoslavism. The quotations above illustrate the principal relationship towards Yugoslavia in this writing: to begin with, it is the subject of the nostalgic remembering, when it frequently takes on the form of a chronotopical figuration, becoming ‘Yugoslavia as the (Golden) past’. Revealing “the inseparability of space and time” (Bakhtin 1981: 84), in this formation ‘Yugoslavia is yesterday’ (Slapšak). Yet, there can be also ‘cracks’ in the Golden age narrative that permeate the idealistic, nostalgic memory. Longing for Yugoslavia as the ‘impossible object’ appears also as an ‘impossibility’ of Yugoslavia as the state, that is, it points at the presumably systemic flaws of the historical Yugoslavia, reminding us of “a thesis about the unfinished Yugoslav modernization with the bureaucratic ‘administering’ of the repression” (Jambrešić Kirin 2007: 24). But the grief for the lost homeland applies anyway more to “the dissolution of a utopian-humanist vision of socialism, than a demise of the state per se” (Drndić 2009: 185)4 . The Yugoslav chronotope is part of this utopian imagination, “an imaginary location in time and space related to a representation of a certain set of values of the utopian community” (Russ and Bryant 2005). As already said, Yugoslav socialist and antifascist traditions are the platform to criticize the post-Yugoslav ‘transition’ societies, often executed by drawing parallels between the Second World War, Holocaust, and the Yugoslav wars. Among others, Daša Drndić, David Albahari, Filip David, and Luka Bekavac in their writings articulate most hauntingly these analogies. Moreover, this insisting on the antifascist struggle has a particular relevance in the post-Yugoslav context, for it cannot devoid of the “other two fundamental concepts that define it – a struggle for the social justice and […] the community of the Yugoslav peoples” (Markovina 2017: 42). Joining many other post-Yugoslav scholars (Stojanović, Močnik, Buden etc.), Markovina further asserts that “local antifascism was created on the Yugoslav platform and could not be understood outside of it” (ibid.). Explicitly contrasted to the ruling revisionist historical narratives, antifascist Yugoslavia appears in the post-Yugoslav discourse, including the literary one, as an alternative possibility of political and communal coming together. This is one of the reasons behind the real proliferation of writings on Yugoslavia, but also on ‘post-Yugoslavia’, as types of alternative cultural and political histories, explaining how it could be possible that the “‘imaginary Yugoslavia’ revived only after the real one had been destroyed” (Velikonja 2012: 4

“tuga zbog takvog gubitka vjerovatno se više odnosila na disoluciju utopističko-himanističke vizije socijalizma negoli na raspad države per se”.

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

81). Besides this libertarian argument, the ‘writing of Yugoslavia’ belongs to the discursive qualities of post-Yugoslav literary discourse: “the true explosion, the activation of the reality comes into being only after the events have been written down. The writing induces the events, the happenings, the history.” (Šalgo 1997: 69).5 Figuration of Yugoslavia in literature, and the events and history this ‘writing of Yugoslavia’ as a “specific symbolic Yuniverse” (Pogačar, 2010: 199) generates are the theme of this chapter. I analyse the presence of the Yugoslav past in the present-day narrative reality, as a nostalgic object, but also as a platform of critique and a possibility to conceive of an identity different from those imposed by the dominant ethnonational matrix. The perspective of war (Ilić on Habermas 2011: 12) in this analysis is critical. Writing about the Yugoslav wars in the works of the post-Yugoslav authors fulfils the demand of autonomy and distancing which reflects the ultimate ethical requirement in the situation of a crime committed in the name of the collective. Without an authorial distancing, a “duty to respond” (Dimitrijević 2011), writing about the Yugoslav wars could easily adapt to the official post-Yugoslav nationalist narratives. The authorial position informed and constituted by this duty of responding to the injustice could, thus, be defining for the literary discourse we would name ‘postYugoslav’. This ethical demand is what already Danilo Kiš conceptualized as the author’s agency and the meaning of authorship: “In that sense, to write, hic and nunc, differently, as it were outside and despite the canons and demands of the day dictated by the ruling groups […], it means fighting for the moral and political freedom of a culture” (Kiš 1974: 13). Post-Yugoslav literature is indeed defined by the “irreducible difference” (Bass 2005: xiii); it has been written outside the canon of national literatures, but also outside and despite the dominant (and authoritarian) discourses. The critical recollection involves also questioning of the mythical representations of socialist Yugoslavia, exploring the “lived history’s ‘ambivalence or undecidability in the most unsettling and provocative manner possible’” (LaCapra in Jambrešić Kirin 2004: 132). Picturing of the Yugoslav Golden age over the images of consumer culture as a “mental figure of modernity” (Duda in Kosmos 2015: 24) in Ugrešić, Tišma, Lovas and other authors’ prose, shows also a debatable Yugoslav “superficial and profitable acceptance of Western-type modernity” (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 2004: 101). This scale between the nostalgic remembering, the ambivalence of the lived experience and finally the critical reproaching of both Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav times characterize the fiction of the Serbian-Hungarian

5

“Jer prava eksplozija, aktiviranje stvarnosti nastaje tek nakon zapisivanja događaja. Pismo indukuje događaje, zbivanja, istoriju.”

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author Ildiko Lovas (b. 1967 in Subotica/Szabadka).6 Lovas’ short stories from her 2005 collection Via del Corso epitomize the complexity of post-Yugoslav literary discourse. While this author in a memorable way narrativizes the Yugoslav Golden age, she is critical not solely of the post-Yugoslav nationalisms, but also of socialist Yugoslavia’s times. According to the categorization of the post-Yugoslav literature offered by a researcher Robert Rakočević in his 2011 article, the texts principally informed by the critique of the Yugoslav ideology form in fact one of the four postYugoslav literature ‘subcategories’. The other three are the so-called literary postYugoslavism, then texts that focus on the critique of the post-war nationalisms, and the exile literature. (Rakočević 2011: 204). Hence, as already noted, Lovas’ work is exemplary of the post-Yugoslav literary discourse, whereas her collection Via del Corso is one of the most significant and relevant post-Yugoslav fictional works. Next to writing, she worked as a journalist and was engaged in various Hungarian minority cultural bodies as the advisor. Besides the ‘post-Yugoslav’ themes, Lovas’ writing is a feminist exploration of history, literary history, ‘women’s literary genres’, authorship. Her most prominent books translated into Serbian are the collection Via del Corso (2001 Hungarian; 2005 Serbian), and novels Španska nevesta (Spanish Bride, 2008; 2009), Izlaz na Jadran: James Bond u Bačkoj (Access to the Adriatic: James Bond in Bačka, 2005; 2009) and Kamenčić (A Pebble, 2010; 2012).7 Ildiko Lovas is one of the authors of the post-Yugoslav ‘search for lost time’. While on one hand this locates Yugoslavia in the space of the impossible and presumably the never existing, making it a melancholic object, it also activates the female narrators’ need, desire or ability to write, emerging as Julia Kristeva’s construction of a melancholic character in her study Black Sun (1987). Her overview of the Western theorizing of the concept of “written melancholia” suggest its paradoxical duality, being both the feeling of loss and the indicator of creativity: [I]f loss, bereavement, and absence trigger the work of the imagination and nourish it permanently as much as threaten it and spoil it, it is also noteworthy that the work of art as fetish emerges when the activating sorrow has been repudiated. The artist consumed by melancholia is at the same time the most relentless in his struggle against the symbolic abdication that blankets him (Kristeva 1992: 9). This link among the female creativity and authorship and the narrativization of the Yugoslav past is a distinguishable trait of the post-Yugoslav literature as the feminist writing. Dubravka Ugrešić installed the female autofictional writer as the narrator of the post-Yugoslav prose about the exile and the nostalgic Yugoslav mem6 7

A town close to border with Hungary, situated in northern Vojvodina, autonomous Serbian province in which Hungarian minority makes some 13% of the population. Translations of titles are from the Serbian language.

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

ories, while other authors in different ways continue this tradition. Some of the most significant examples are Olja Savičević Ivančević’s narrator in her novel Adio, kauboju who becomes a writer once she starts remembering and writing about the (Yugoslav) past. Also, Lamija Begagić drew on the chronotopic qualities of literary Yugoslavia by structuring the narrative of the Yugoslavia as a literary past of her protagonists’ in her collection of stories Godišnjica mature (Graduation Anniversary, 2005). Ildiko Lovas’ spatial and temporal itineraries evoke the past and help her autofictional narrator fight the writer’s block, establishing the correlation between the female authorship, writing and the past. That Ildiko Lovas is a Serbian-Hungarian author is pertinent to her writing; this fact has been integrated into her literature, as that different, ‘outside and despite’ idiom, linguistically, culturally and politically. Lovas herself explained a paradoxical exilic, or diasporic situation of her biography and writing: I live in Subotica, but I was not the one to decide that my writing belongs to the Hungarian literature. I am of Hungarian nationality, and it would be difficult not to belong to that literary culture. In Serbia, though, I cannot compete for any of the literary prizes, not because I don’t belong to Serbian literature, but because I don’t write in Serbian language. By this I want to say that my literature belongs, or at least I hope it does, to the Serbian one. (Lovas in Džodan 2013) Lovas has highlighted her position of otherness, as she normally writes and publishes in a virtually foreign cultural ambiance, yet at the same time she has defined for the post-Yugoslav literature critical moment of its transnationality. Yet, Lovas’ experience is a shared post-Yugoslav experience of political and geographical changeover that many other post-Yugoslav authors went through as emigrants, but also once the new borders were drawn in the Yugoslav successor states: “Sometimes the border literally moves across a stationary border-crosser, as when borders and frontiers move in war” (Schimanski 2006: 43). Moreover, the intersection of space and time – in this work objectified as the juncture of geography and history – are the narrative coordinates in Lovas’ novel Kamenčić: knjiga o Leni, i o Leni Rifenštal: roman (A Pebble: A Book About Leni, and about Leni Riefenstahl: a Novel, 2010). This work represents her various literary preoccupations: it is both a feminist romance novel8 and an account of the protagonist’s dealing with the Yugoslav wars and the issues of the ethics and respon-

8

Lovas’ romance is certainly influenced by “the development of a feminist psychoanalytical theory which gives primacy of place to questions of female desire [and] has encouraged a consideration of romantic writing and its compulsive and pleasurable qualities” (M. Eagleton 1990: 91).

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sibility that define this awareness.9 The novel is structured as a twofold narrative: one follows the life of a history teacher, Leni Kozma, whose everyday routine has been disturbed not only by a corpse found in the attic of the school she works in, but also owing to a romance developing between her and a geography teacher. Agonizing the protagonist, the affair is narrativized along the lines of the ‘Harlequin romance’ a love story genre that entails “pathological experience of sex difference” (Snitow 1979: 143) and places the distance in the centre of the romanticized sexuality. Hence, a romance conveyed as a rivalry among the gendered stereotypical roles and their eventual acceptance is the skeleton of the narrative about the responsibility and a probability of recuperating or fixing the past through a historiographic method: the protagonist’s vocation indicates this attempt, for besides her teaching she also researches about the local past in an archive. The conventions of the romance genre only stress the protrusion of the historical reality: the world of the romance novel “has no past” (ibid.: 148), whereas society is non-existent, it is just the “surroundings” (ibid.). Fulfilling also the convention considering the protagonist’s career – romance heroines “have familiar service jobs – they are teachers, nurses, nursery-maids” (ibid.:149) – the fable takes on “an eternal present in which the actual present […] is dissolved and only a comfortable timeless, universal battle remains” (151). This is also because Lovas trusts in “the imaginative dimensions of literary discourse [which] may then suggest ways in which romance, as much because of its contradictory effects as despite them, has something positive to offer its audience, as readers, and as women readers” (Light 1984: 9). Hence, she counts on the feminist propensities of the “romantic fiction [that] makes heterosexuality easy, by suspending history in its formulae […] and by offering women readers a resolution in which submission and repression are not just managed without pain or humiliation but managed at all” (ibid.: 22). In this novel, however, this accomplishment relates at the same time to the resolution of the traumatic events of the (recent) past. Finally, Lovas basically produces what Light calls the language which politicizes “without abandoning the categories of entertainment” (ibid.: 23). The second narrative line is composed as a fictionalized biography of the controversial German movie director Leni Riefenstahl, acting as the protagonist’s, that is, the autofictional narrator’s alter ego. Riefenstahl’s story is a metafictional reflection about the political instrumentalization of arts, and hence, about the responsibility of an artist and their resolution of the ‘duty to respond’. Underlying argument of this theme relates to the paradigmatic debate about the so-called autonomy of arts which in fact serves as a platform of the conformist alliance with the politi-

9

I wrote at length about the romance novel genre, history and the Yugoslav chronotope in Kamenčić in my 2017 article “Moved by the Past: Spatial and Temporal Inquiries in Ildikó Lovas’ Prose”.

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

cal and cultural elites, both in the Nazi Germany and in late Yugoslavia dissolving down the divides of its ethnic nationalisms. The fable of the corpse found in the school attic develops as a detective story with Leni Kozma as the chief investigator. Leni dubs her “genre” of investigation the “attic history” (Lovas 2012: 254)10 , alluding to the hidden history of the past events: comparable to the attic corpse, the facts about these events are either hidden or ignored, though they are present and necessary to acknowledge. The motif of a dead body points up the reality of Yugoslav wars Leni was not aware of before the discovery of the corpse, but now death becomes real and present, necessitating the questions of remembering and responsibility, the most contentious and tabooed matters in the post-Yugoslav societies. All of the three necessary assumptions for confronting with the past have been ignored in them: psychological, political and moral, last being the “duty to remember the victims, to acknowledge their trauma, and to confront both individual and collective responsibility for their suffering” (Dragović-Soso 2010: 34). Remembering and responsibility refracted through the standpoint of the female narrator and her preoccupation with the issues of authorship are represented in the three stories analysed in this paper. The first one, “Via del Corso I”, is the narrative of the nostalgic journey to the Yugoslav past and its literary consequences, while the second one, “Stvarni konobar” (The Waiter Embodied) relates the ethnonational and racist ideology behind the identity concerns. The last one, “Zlatna priča” (Golden Storytelling) is a critical account on the socialist Yugoslavia and its totalitarian ‘episode’, again impossible to tell without the female narrator, the forthcoming author of her own story.

II 1.

Borders of Time and Space and Authorship: “Via del Corso I” bilo je kao kod kuće, u prošlosti, kad kuća nije imala ni mjesto ni granicu (Daša Drndić)11

Drawing on the traditions of the romance genre, Lovas’ writing is consciously ‘staged’ as a space of the female sexual and individual liberation familiar from the ‘women’s genres’. On the other side, it is constructed as an interdiscursive (post-Yugoslav) text. “Via del Corso I”12 is an autofictional account of crossing the former – today an imaginary Yugoslav border – which activates the narrator’s 10 11 12

“tavanska istorija”. It felt like home, in the past, when a house had no place of its own, nor a border (Drndić 2009: 147). Henceforth: Corso. All analysed stories are taken from the 2005 collection Via del Corso, a selection of the author’s stories in Serbian translation by Arpad Vicko (see Bibliography).

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memory of the past and through its chronotopic capacity, motivates a wish, but also a possibility, to travel back to the past. Yet, besides being the figure of the travel, both spatial and temporal, the border indicates the classical edifying journey of the protagonist in search of an identity. A melancholic devising of the Yugoslav past as a wish to reach and preserve it corresponds to a psychoanalytic process of introjection which “refers to the way the subject in fantasy ‘takes into self’ objects from the outside world, and, henceforth, preserves them ‘inside’ the self” (Diamond 1998: 176). Nevertheless, “if introjection is to take place, the capacity to symbolize experience needs to be developed as a way of coping with separation and loss” (ibid.: 177). Literary ‘symbolization’ of the Yugoslav past is a way of coping with the loss, and an attempt of restoration of the ‘lost past’: “For it is only via the representation of the object in its absence that the symbol can come to replace the loss as a memory which is, from then on, registered psychically.” (Ibid.) Yugoslavia becomes a literary figuration owing to the literary transposition of the space and time into the figuration of a chronotope. Bakhtin alone stressed the importance and actual prevalence of time in the construction of the chronotope; this is where melancholia and chronotopic structure coincide. Time is substantial aspect of their appearance. More accurately, they coincide precisely in the chronotope that could be dubbed ‘Yugoslavia as the past’, a steady literary emblem of the post-Yugoslav fiction.13 This chronotope signals that the time has passed and that it has been lost, comparable to the melancholic worldview that also does not tell apart the two. The melancholic feeling of being ‘locked’ in the time gone causes distancing from the actual reality – actual time and space – wherefore the travel is the common motif related to the melancholic characters (Hamer 2009: 52). Narrators who are autofictional writers do travel, crossing not only spatial but also temporal borders, which are metaphors of those travels that implicate the critical identity shifts. Hence, containing not solely spatial and temporal dimensions, but pertaining also to the identity issues, the border figures as a variation of the ‘Yugoslavia as the past’ chronotope. Crossing spatial borders activates temporal flows and the narrator of the story travels in time through space: “The time starts entangling, and it seems I could untangle it only in space: at that point I would leave, I would go straight to the border.” (Corso: 98)14 Her ‘acquisition’ of space through physical motion, physical crossing of the border is also the ‘acquisition’ of the past time through the process

13 14

More about melancholia and the chronotope in my 2014 article: “Postjugoslovenske autorke pišu Jugoslaviju: traganje za izgubljenom prošlošću i njegove književne posledice”. “počinje da se zapetljava vreme koje – čini mi se – mogu jedino u prostoru da raspetljam: tada bih krenula, uputila bih se pravo prema granici”.

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

of memorizing, in itself constitutive for her attempt to assemble the fragments of her identity: [K]renuti, makar i pešice, pravac granica, pešačiti do Postojne, prespavati u hladnoj planinskoj brvnari, spustiti se zatim u Opatiju, izaći na sunce […], virnuti načas šta se dešava na Rijeci, ukrcati se u voz […]. Da saznam, konačno, ko sam. (Ibid.: 92) to leave, if only on foot, straight to the border, then walk to Postojna, spend a night in a cold mountain cottage, climb down to Opatija, go out in the sun […], then have a look at what is going on in Rijeka, get on a train […]. To finally find out who I am. In “Via del Corso I” space has been ‘temporalized’, similarly to how Svetlana Boym (2001) theorizes reflective nostalgia: it implies temporalization of space (space ‘opens’ to the multiple and fluid interpretations of the past), while restorative nostalgia implies the spatialization of time (contemporaneity is dominated by the preferred historical period). Spaces of the narrator’s former life and former homeland ‘open’ in her search for lost time, and, presumably, her lost identity: “A person crossing from one territory into another crosses a topographical, but also a temporal border; and this temporal border […] figures time as an imaginary topography” (Schimanski 2006: 53). She recounts her journey to Trieste, which used to be the ‘West’ closest to Yugoslavia, an accessible paradise of purchasable commodities. However, offering also a sense of independence and some sort of freedom, Trieste has been holding an emblematic place in the discourse of Yugo-nostalgia: it is a type of a ‘lieu de mémoire’ in the realm of post-Yugoslav remembering. Both Lovas, and Ugrešić in her essay “Popovi i papige” (“Priests and Parrots”, The Culture of Lies) distinguish this particular spot in the geography of Yugo-nostalgia, very often functioning as its metonymy. Trieste is a madeleine of the shared Yugoslav past, it attracts the memories of the real, but also quite effortlessly of the imagined past, being the authenticity pledge of the actually existing Golden Yugoslav age. However, while Lovas explores subjective and sentimental aspects of remembering, Ugrešić disenchanting account on the Trieste narrative ridicules the mythical dimensions of the Yugoslav past: [D]a smo mi (mi, Jugoslaveni) nešto posve drugo od njih (Čeha, Mađara i Poljaka...), što je, uostalom, potvrđivala svakidašnjica (mi smo mogli u Trst po kavu, a oni nisu!) [...]. Za sve je kriva talijanska kava, gunđa Petar Petrović. Nije mu doduše, pružala osjećaj da je Talijan, ali ga je jasno odvajala od njih... od Bukurešta. (Ugrešić 2002: 50–51) [W]e (we, Yugoslavs) were something quite different from them (Czechs, Hungarians and Poles…), which was after all confirmed by everyday reality (we could

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go to Trieste for a coffee, and they couldn’t!) […]. It was all because of that Italian coffee, grumbled Petar Petrović. It wasn’t that it made him feel Italian, but it did distinguish him clearly from them... from Bucharest. (Ugrešić 1998: 35) Still, the writer Petar Petrović declares himself to be Yugoslav: “Never mind, I’m Yugoslav, that’s what I’ve always been, after all” (ibid.)15 . Lovas’ story too is the identity quest account, and while the journey to Trieste is a stage in this search, few other elements of the narrative suggest that this narrator also identifies as Yugoslav. Besides the above-mentioned trip to the places of Yugoslavia, which is a recurrent refrain of the story, she unambiguously declares herself to be Yugoslav: “and precisely that is what I would like to share, in this very place: I’m Yugoslav, I sure know that” (Corso: 94)16 . Though entwined with a commodified nostalgia evoking her first housecoat from Trieste that every five-year old “Yugo-girl” had, the political charge of the Yugoslav self-declaration is – despite the latent irony – pervasive. Furthermore, the fact that the former ‘Yugo-girl’ arrives to Trieste in the late summer is an indispensable metaphor of the narration: that the summer has been long and abundant, and that after such a summer the heavy autumn rains would follow has been ardently repeated. A detailed account about her unsuccessful attempt to buy an umbrella in a store in Trieste converts spontaneously into the unsuccessful attempt to protect herself from another type of a blizzard – the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. Despite the unfortunate events in the past and general gloomy atmosphere, however, the narrator reiterates that no matter what happens “the summer was abundant anyways”. The summer she unceasingly addresses is apparently the metaphorical summer of the past time, while the sentence is the paraphrase of Rilke’s introductory verse from his poem “Herbsttag” (Autumn Day): “Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß” (Rilke 1920: 42). The verse is also the epigraph of the story and repeats twice, in Hungarian and in Serbian translation.17 Throughout the text the narrator alludes to it, speculating which translation is actually more successful and concludes that she should first of all understand Szenteleki’s soft and peaceable translation (Corso: 99). Resembling the waiter from the story “Stvarni konobar”, the narrator repeatedly states that her origins are in Subotica, recapturing Lovas’ exemplary literary theme of the bond between the local and the cosmopolitan, for the very fact of her place of birth is what qualifies her understanding of the world, the links among the past and the present, Trieste and Yugoslavia. “Via del Corso I” is open, fluid text, while the reader becomes also involved in a linguistic challenge posed by the narrator. The story is available for the Serbian 15 16 17

“Ništa, ja sam Jugoslaven, to sam, uostalom, oduvijek i bio”. “I to bih htela da podelim, i to baš ovde: ja bar znam da sam Jugovićka”. Serbian translation is by the poet Ivan V. Lalić; Hungarian by Kornel Szenteleki, the author who is considered to be the founder of Hungarian ‘minority’ literature in Vojvodina.

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

readers solely in the Serbian translation, but the verses by Rilke are in Serbian and Hungarian. The narrator discusses the problem of translation and accessibility of foreign literature and culture, as if to show that “the work of literature might itself be said to partake in a border crossing, when it is translated from one language into another, or through the very act of interpretation” (Schimanski 2006: 42).18 Rilke’s poem conveys the ambiance of the late summer and fall which is about to come, yet the second part of the poem transforms into a description of a lonesome individual who only wants to write, read and walk under the autumn trees. It is too late for him to have a home, and presumably also, to belong somewhere: “Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr” (Rilke 1920: 42). Besides the writer being the subject of the poem, Rilke’s poem and Lovas’ story correspond in their negative outlining of the theme of home. Yet, while the home and the homeland as Yugoslavia is lost, in Lovas’ story the past can be still recuperated in the Proustian search of the lost time. At the end of her journey the narrator reaches the two imaginary realms: one is the Yugoslav past, and the other is literature, personified in Rilke and Márai, the authors who would today be paradigmatic figures of transnational literature. They were in fact the cross-cultural authors, Rilke a Bohemian-Austrian Germanspeaking author, and Sándor Márai, Hungarian writer and journalist who lived in Germany and France and wrote in German. The narrator’s encounter with Márai occurs as she enters the bookstore and takes one of his books from a shelf. Simply holding the book, she feels it is the only familiar thing she comes upon in a foreign city. Also, Duino Castle near Trieste came to be a renowned place after Rilke had spent his time there writing his illustrious Duino Elegies, thus its name indicates Rilke’s poetry and not simply a geographical or a touristic destination. The narrator sees a guidepost directed to Duino and wishes to photograph under it so to have the proof of “where she might have gone”, adding that she would go in the direction of Rilke’s quotation. In her imagination guideposts are not about geography, but poetry: the reality resonates with Rilke’s verses and Márai’s unsaid, but present lines.19 The writers’ figures help her understand the actual trouble with her journey: she obsessively quotes portions of their writings, in truth struggling to write herself. The meaning of writing surfaces as the essential cognition of her journey, then she would otherwise grow 18

19

The fact that the original is in Hungarian makes the ‘linguistic challenge’ not only more complex but points at paradoxes of literature founded on the (ethno)national language and culture. I would suggest that there is an invisible quotation form Márai’s 1942 novel Embers: “‘My homeland,’ says the guest, ‘no longer exists. My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin. What’s left? Whatever mysterious substance held it all together no longer works. Everything’s come apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded. When that happens, the only thing to do is go away.’” (Márai 2002: 92)

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distant from the text she “should have written back then […]. Which is the most important thing” (Corso: 96).20 Finally, the two authors suggest not only the autofictional narrator’s overcoming of a writer’s block and a claim to authorship, but help her conceive of the ‘literary culture’ she belongs to. A nostalgic journey was necessary for the narrator’s writing to take place: the voyage has been narrativized as writer’s block, diminishing once the border is crossed and all that the border entails starts spreading out. The complex of national culture, literature and language has been evoked and contested, while her writer’s identity has resolved the question of national belonging. The move across borders, which is not only the “‘distance’ from the home culture, but [which entails the creation] of ‘new literacies’” (Lukić 2018a: 335) is, thus, a necessary step for the autofictional narrator’s mastering of her transnational, diasporic, feminist authorship. Contextualising Azade Seyhan’s concept of “paranational communities”, Jasmina Lukić argues that precisely the feminist movements in the post-Yugoslav region are a good example of an “opposition to their local nationalisms, […] continually producing networks and alliances beyond national borders” (ibid.). This story is also Lovas’s (post-Yugoslav) programmatic text: her writing does not belong only to a ‘minority’, but also to a ‘minor literature’, as Deleuze and Guattari theorized dissent, political, and collective writing.21 Lovas’ literature is a transnational, diasporic, feminist, political writing of those “fluid groups gathered around cultural projects that undermine the rigidity of purely nationally-oriented policies and projects” (Lukić 2018a: 335).

20 21

“udaljiti […] od teksta koji bi tada trebalo da napišem […]. Što je od svega važnije.” Cursive added for emphasis. Together with repeating the linguistic and cultural logic of majority culture, the postYugoslav works of fiction analysed in this paper appear to be comparable to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition: “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2003: 16). Moreover, Djurić and Šuvaković in their 2003 study on Yugoslav avant-gardes related to this concept owing to the fact that everything in avant-gardes is, like in the minor literature, political (Djurić and Šuvaković 2003: xviii). Finally, by expanding Deleuze and Guattari’s term, Jasmina Lukić applied Seyhan’s concept of transnational literature (2001) and Lionnet and Shih’s ‘minor transnationalism’ (2005) to post-Yugoslav literature showing the way to a “literary history/herstory of post-Yugoslav literature as transnational literature” (Lukić 2018a: 335).

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

II 2.

On Real and Fictional Identities: “Stvarni konobar” Imala sam i ja papagaja, ali ga je mačka pojela. (Ildiko Lovas)22

In her story “Stvarni konobar” (The Waiter Embodied)23 Lovas narrativizes the course of identity construction, specifically the ways the ethnonational identity is being discerned and at that point used, by organizing the story as an inquiry into the relationship between the reality and fiction as an ultimate commentary about identity as a non-essentialist category. The narrative develops as a metafictional story about writing, that is, about the struggle of the writer – the narrator of the story – to incorporate the reality into the fiction she attempts to compose. Yet, as she informs, this effort does not pertain the aesthetic, but rather ethical prerequisites: “authenticity in certain times is not solely the aesthetic, but also ethical concept” (Waiter: 22)24 . The demand for authenticity is, however, accompanied by courage as a precondition of “writing about the reality”: “Before the courageousness leaves me, because then I would start fabulizing again, though it would be necessary to write exactly about the reality in this moment in which the protagonist of a story I wrote few years ago stood in front of me.” (ibid.: 21)25 Fiction enters into the writer’s real life personified as the waiter – a protagonist of one of her earlier stories (“moj junak”; ibid.: 24) turning up in the writer’s kitchen to tell his story in person. This paradoxical twirl is what made her realize that she needs to write about the reality she previously feared confronting, but despite her moral dilemma the documentary images of war flash in the text only to show the debated difficulty of the artistic transposing of the horrors of history: [H]tela sam da pišem o Sarajevu, tačnije o tome, kakav je osećaj putovati u osvetljenom tramvaju praćen okom snajperiste, ali mi se učinilo da nemam na to pravo, pa je novela tako samo u nekakvoj mučnoj iznudici nagovestila da putnik može da bude i meta, pa sam mesto radnje ponovo premestila u Suboticu i na Palić, i nastavila da pišem o strahu od nailaska užasa: autentičnost u nekim vremenima nije samo estetički, nego i etički pojam, pa naspram svih tih muka, naspram svih vlastitih unutrašnjih dilema i, konačno, naspram strahovima bremenitih dana mog glavnog junaka, bio mi je neophodan nekakav kontrapunkt,

22 23 24 25

I had a parrot myself, but the cat ate it. (“Stvarni konobar”: 24) The story will be henceforth referenced as Waiter. “autentičnost u nekim vremenima nije samo estetički, nego i etički pojam”. “i dok mi ne ponestane hrabrosti, jer bih ponovo stala da izmišljam, mada bi sada trebalo pisati baš o stvarnosti, jer me je pronašao, najednom se preda mnom stvorio junak jedne moje, pre nekoliko godina napisane novele”.

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bio mi je potreban neko ko pojma nema ni o čemu, neko ko bi samo protutnjao pričom. Taj junak je postao Palko, konobar. (ibid.: 21–22) I wanted to write about Sarajevo, that is, about how it feels to ride on an illuminated tram followed by the eye of a sniper, but I felt I was not entitled to do that, so as in a sickening extortion the story suggested that the passenger can be a target, and I relocated the place of the story to Subotica and Palić and continued to write fearing the approaching horror: authenticity in certain periods of time is not solely an aesthetic, but also an ethical concept, so despite the agony, despite all personal dilemmas and, finally, despite the fearful days of my protagonist, I needed a counterpoint, I needed someone who has no clue about a thing, someone who would just run through the story. Palko, the waiter, became that protagonist. Nevertheless, the answer to the mentioned difficulty is the conclusion that literature possesses a “healing power”, and that in fact “books could save from reality” (ibid.: 26), helping the writer understand she simply had to create, or better put, to recreate the character of the waiter. Importantly, a recurrent remark is that the waiter is the “counterpoint” to reality: [K]ao kontrapunkt onih glava koje u osvetljenom tramvaju tako lako mogu da postanu mete snajperiste, kao kontrapunkt zatvorenog, opkoljenog grada (jer svakome gradu može to da se desi za sekundu, u to smo se mogli uveriti za poslednjih deset godina) – valjda bih se, bez cilja i smera, otisnula u beli svet. A ovako sam nastavila da sedim na svojoj zadnjici i, hvatajući se grčevito za rečenice, pregurala sve ove godine. (Waiter: 24) As a counterpoint to those heads in an illuminated tram which can so easily become the sniper’s targets, as a counterpoint to the closed, besieged city (because it can happen to any city in a second, we could witness that in last ten years) – I guess I could head off, without an aim or a direction, into the wide world. But I continued sitting on my bottom and, clutching desperately onto the sentences, I got through all these years. The narrator managed to “pull through”, by “holding on to the sentences”, possibly precisely those referring to the waiter, that “loudly real, imposingly living” (ibid.: 24) one who “survives” (ibid.: 26). Following this, the narrator confesses she didn’t “write him” in the first place, for he was simply “too alive” (ibid.: 24) to be effortlessly consigned to the realm of fiction. Through this metafictional game Lovas joins the writing of Luka Bekavac and Snežana Andrejević (analysed in the Chapter IV), committed to the problem and a possibility of transposing the real, historical events into the work of fiction. Yet, an incident terminating the narrator’s faith in the power of books soon takes place: her favourite book – Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

Parrot – gets damaged by the heat coming from the desk lamp standing too close to the book: Primila sam to kao znamen: plakala sam neutešno, bila sam sigurna da je život nemoguć tamo gde knjige nisu bezbedne. […] neutešno sam ponavljala: hoću da odem odavde, samo je pitanje vremena kad ću i sama da se oprljim, da izgorim, kad će da izgori, ako ne baš i moja koža, kosti, ali duša, volja, život – svakako. (Waiter: 26) I took it as a sign: I cried inconsolably, I was certain that life is not possible where the books are not safe. [...] I kept repeating desperately: I want to leave, it is only a matter of time when I would scorch, burn myself, maybe not my skin and bones, but my soul, will, my life – for sure. Despite an infantile regret for her favourite book as a textual sign pointing to the mentioned inadequacy to write about that what is really important – the reality of war and suffering – she internalizes the accident as her own bodily experience. She imagines herself to be burning and through this empathic gesture of identification she manages to transpose the difficult reality underlying the fiction: “In some sort of suppressed pain because of Sarajevo, in a flustered, desperate fear for my own town, I invented that strong, self-willed waiter who always reacts instinctively.” (Ibid.: 26)26 Mention of Sarajevo qualifies the book accident as the realityreferential: her favourite book damaged by fire stands for the thousands of books destroyed in the Serbian shelling of the Vijećnica library in Sarajevo in 1992. The narrator’s intention to create a character who would survive is a result of her realizing that “life is impossible where the books are not safe”. A paraphrase of Heine’s citation which is an integral part of the Versunkene Bibliothek memorial to the Nazi book burning in Berlin27 is the pre-text associating this minor episode from the narrator’s personal life with the horrifying historical reality. Moreover, the allusion might also refer to the mentioned quote as emblematic of the Berlin’s memorial, in itself an exemplary representation of the ethical artistic practice of commemoration and confrontation with the past, a project absent in the official post-Yugoslav “politics of memory”. The story, nevertheless, grows more complex, entangling into the acknowledged divide between the reality and fiction. In Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot – the narrator’s book that had been burnt – the storyteller relates an amateur Flaubert expert and admirer who sets to find the stuffed parrot that inspired the illustrious writer 26 27

“u nekom potmulom bolu za Sarajevom, u usplahirenoj, očajničkoj strepnji za vlastiti grad, izmislila sam snažnog, divljeg konobara koji na sve reaguje instiktivno”. “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.” (Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.) Quoted from: http://www. denkmalplatz.de/versunkene-bibliothek-in-berlin/ [10.6.2018].

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while writing his story “Un cœur simple or Le perroquet” (from the collection Trois Contes, 1877). A curious motif of the lifelike – but not living – bird as the source of inspiration is advanced by the quest of the protagonist for the authentic taxidermied parrot in a museum in which dozens of similar parrots are on display. The search is intertwined with the biographical fragments from Flaubert’s life that should help reconstruct the personality of ‘real Flaubert’, though they only reflect the pointlessness of such an attempt, similar to trying to find the ‘real parrot’. Going back to the waiter’s story, a similar issue arises: the writer’s intention is to recapture the real waiter in her fiction, or, read ‘inversely’, this fictional character materializes in reality of the writer. In either direction, the waiter cannot remain unaltered before and after the ‘transition procedure’. As Wolfgang Iser put it, reality is made fictional by the “acts of simulation”, which by repetition forge reality as a sign, while the imaginary becomes representative of what it mediates.28 The transposition of reality into the text is, it seems, as impossible as is the materialization of the fiction into the reality. Hence, the relationship between the literature and reality is transposed by an intertextual act: the autofictional narrator read a book (Barnes’) which refers to another book (Flaubert’s), interconnected by a shared topic of authenticity. While literature and reality remain at once paradoxically detached and mutually referential, the demand of authenticity – which is the source of the writer’s initial despair and hesitation – cannot be fulfilled. But, it is here that the authorial figure stands as the guarantor of authenticity: the metafictional/autofictional moral dilemma of a writer who considers the relevance of fiction in the horrifying historical times helps resolve the reality-fiction divide: the “demand to respond” is articulated as the demand for the responsibility of writing. While trying to settle the reality-fiction confusion the narrator constantly repeats that “something else is at the heart of the matter” (“reč je o nečemu drugom”), as a speculation about an alternative response to the perplexing reality matters, that would be eventually offered by the waiter himself. Once the writer encounters the waiter in her kitchen, the first thing he utters is the self-declaration: “I’m Hungarian” (“ja sam Mađar”, Waiter: 27), followed by the history of his family and his birth place, as from his point of view they offer tangible evidences for his identity

28

“Bezieht sich also der fiktionale Text auf Wirklichkeit, ohne sich in deren Bezeichnung zu erschöpfen, so ist die Wiederholung ein Akt des Fingierens, durch den Zwecke zum Vorschein kommen, die der wiederholten Wirklichkeit nicht eignen. Ist Fingieren aus der wiederholten Wirklichkeit nicht ableitbar, dann bringt sich ihm ein Imaginäres zur Geltung, das mit der im Text wiederkehrenden Realität zusammengeschlossen wird. So gewinnt der Akt des Fingierens seine Eigentümlichkeit dadurch, daß er die Wiederkehr lebensweltlicher Realität im Text bewirkt und gerade in solcher Wiederholung das Imaginäre in eine Gestalt zieht, wodurch sich die wiederkehrende Realität zum Zeichen und das Imaginäre zur Vorstellbarkeit des dadurch Bezeichneten aufheben.” (Iser 2001: 20)

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

claims. The writer’s earlier remark that she wants to write a story about someone “who knows nothing” now falls into place: it is an ironic commentary about the waiter’s naive belief that his identity could be decided by himself alone, and according to some ‘objective’ criteria. Importantly, the waiter’s story unfolds after he had been falsely accused of being someone he didn’t feel he was, triggering his account as an explanation of his origins, unmistakably showing who he really was. While he had a conversation with a guest in a restaurant he worked in, the former was hit by a word “ajšer” the waiter had used, as it suggested an unusual, hence easily suspicious, language idiom. The waiter merely wanted to explain how his grandpa was neither rich, nor poor, but rather somewhere in the middle, and used the word of Romani origin “ajšer”, an adjective meaning “wealthy”. And so, while for the waiter it was an indistinct expression, for his collocutor it was an immediate signal of a ‘non-neutral’ and a ‘nonuniversal’ identity, encouraging him to scornfully inquire about “the origin” of the word. Introspectively, however, the waiter ponders: [V]idi se na meni ko sam i odakle sam; osim toga, moj mlađi brat je bio poznati svirac, prosvirao šezdesete godine, svi su nas tako i znali: Mišika primaš, i ja, konobar – njih dvojica su dovoljna za savršenu sreću. Obaška što nisam razumeo čemu to pitanje. (Waiter: 27)

You can tell who I am and where I come from; besides, my younger brother was a famous musician, started playing in 1960, everybody knew us as such: Mišika the lead player, and me, the waiter – two of them are sufficient for the perfect happiness. Plus, I didn’t understand the question in the first place.

The waiter develops his understanding of the ‘origin’ concept, until finally asserting that it is in actual fact irrelevant where some word ‘stems’ from. Inversely, he stresses the realities of everyday life and of a lived experience by verbalizing an interesting conceptual twist according to which the local – precisely in the sense of the concrete, lived experience – is opposed to the ethnonational as an abstract concept and a strategy that targets the perceived difference. Though the restaurant’s guest ironically names the waiter a “local patriot-cosmopolite”, which in fact sounds like a desirable identity definition, the waiter obviously renounces it, keeping on his initial nationality assertion. For, a qualification which involves a non-national or an anti-national identification has been felt as an offense by the waiter who then insists that the person who coined it explained the meaning of those unfamiliar words: [Z]ar nije svejedno odakle je – potiče, ili šta već – neka reč? Ovde je izgovaram, tu gde su je u usta uzimali i moj otac, i moj deda. U Subotici. To sam i rekao

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gospodinu, na šta mi je on odvratio da sam ja jedan lokalpatriota-kosmopolita, i da mi ne predviđa neku budućnost. (ibid.: 28) Isn’t it all the same where a word originates from? I utter it here, here where my father and my grandfather used it. In Subotica. I said that to the gentleman who responded that I am a local patriot-cosmopolite, and that he does not foresee a bright future for me. The writer’s and waiter’s communication is narrativized through this lesson about the identity, whereupon the waiter “who knows nothing” talks from his seemingly amateurish perspective, and the writer acts as a raisonneur. Being seemingly juxtaposed they appear to be a student and a teacher. The waiter at length voices the credentials of his Hungarian roots, that involve the information about his ancestors declaring themselves also as Hungarian, but also about his job as a waiter, when he felt people lived well and where happy: “we were all at home” (ibid.: 30)29 . Unlike the guest’s implication about ethnicity, waiter recognizes home as a harmonious space for “everyone”. However, part of the waiter’s reasoning is one ‘appeal to authority’ that ultimately legitimizes the waiter’s feeling of belonging: Jednom mi je brat, Mišika, vrativši se iz muzičke škole, rekao da je Bela Bartok [...] 1905. godine izjavio: ono što vi nazivate ciganskom muzikom, to uopšte nije ciganska muzika. Nije ciganska, nego mađarska; [...] nama niko nije [...] rekao da sviramo na mađarskom, niti Nikolićima [...] da sviraju na srpskom. (Waiter: 30) My brother Mišika told me once when he returned from school that Bela Bartok [...] said in 1905: what you call Gipsy music is not at all Gipsy music. It is not Gipsy, but Hungarian [...] nobody told us [...] that we play in Hungarian, or to the Nikolićs [...] that they play in Serbian. Apparently being poorly informed about the demands of the new formal identity, the waiter struggles to understand the accusation and asks the writer if she is Hungarian herself, yet she refuses to conform to a blatant ethnonational identification, feeling that the ‘local patriot-cosmopolite’ identity marker is in fact more adequate. On the other hand yet, the waiter recalls the guest who used it as a qualifier for those who would want to silent their ethnic origin and upholds his initial perception about the marker as a fallacy. Nevertheless, the irony of the entire ‘identity scheme’, a type of a tragic misunderstanding, springs from the waiter’s hubristic ignorance about his ‘Romani ethnicity’, that appears to be an empty signifier, a possibility that the waiter never reflected. Hence, the writer as the teacher or the raisonneur tries to provide a content for this identity marker by relying upon the objective method of historiography and offering even some statistical data about 29

“Bili smo svi kod kuće”.

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

the Romani community. Yet, she fails, concluding that the “historiographers are blind” (ibid.: 31), as if also realizing that an attempt to define one’s identity in objectified terms is as well a delusion. Nevertheless, the waiter keeps on insisting that the writer should explain her decision to use the “local patriot-cosmopolite” identification, instead of the Hungarian one, since the waiter, unlike her, knows she is Hungarian too, for him it is a simple fact, the same way he himself is simply a Hungarian. Still not completely giving up her defence of the liberal stance, the narrator struggles to define the local patriotism: “Locally oriented patriotism. Overestimating a birthplace, favouring local minor interests over those of the country, state, people’s interests.” (Ibid.: 33)30 Also, a cosmopolite is a “member of the civic alignment that underrates patriotism, national sentiments, underestimates the national culture” (ibid.: 33–34)31 . Ironically enough, both of the definitions apparently come to pass identical: local patriotism is the overestimation of the local to the disadvantage of the “comprehensive national interests”, while a cosmopolite disregards essentially the same: national feelings and culture. The writer’s attempt to define both the local patriotism and the cosmopolitanism as the progressive identity markers results in a principal denial of the national identity, the only identity the waiter recognizes: the initial malicious guest’s comment about the waiter’s assumed ‘local patriotcosmopolitanism’ highlights the waiter’s nonconformist understanding of the national identity in the first place. In the beginning of his autobiographical account the waiter names not only his own, but also his brother’s profession: he is “primaš” – a leader of a tamboura orchestra playing a type of a tamboura (“prim”) – framing his identity as that of a musician. At the same time this ‘acquired’ identification helps understand the irony underlying the story, for the profession of a musician is common among the Vojvodina Romani (the Hungarian included), a circumstance that explicates the stereotyping mechanisms of ‘soft discrimination’. Nevertheless, further analogies with Flaubert’s text disclose the complexity of the waiter’s situation, conveyed over the knotty interchange between the hypertext and the hypotext, the already remarked intertextual alternations. The protagonist of the “Un cœur simple or Le perroquet” is Felicité, a hard-working housemaid and a compassionate person whose life is consumed by her work at her mistress’s, who left her a parrot Loulou after she had died. Felicité grows exceedingly attached to the bird, sending it to the taxidermist’s after the bird dies, so its body would be preserved. Being also very religious, Felicité donates the taxidermied bird to the local church, the motif that next leads to the final scene in which Felicité after her

30 31

“rodoljublje lokalnog značaja. Precenjivanje užeg zavičaja, pretpostavljanje lokalnih interesa manjeg značaja zemaljskim, državnim, svenarodnim interesima.” “pripadnik građanske struje koja nipodaštava rodoljublje, nacionalno osećanje, potcenjuje nacionalnu kulturu”.

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own death has a vision of Loulou flying above her in the church, a travesty of a pigeon symbolising the Holy Ghost. Yet, humorous characterization of Felicité is intertwined with the narrator’s sympathy: it is not only her affection for the parrot that seems absurd, but also her entire life that passed in a series of routine activities, as it were a prearranged existence without a possibility to choose or at least question her own status. This exactly might be the point of Felicité’s and waiter’s identification. The waiter never ‘tested’ his Romani identity, as he never assumed it to be an ethnic and social class ‘category’: his ignorance, that what he “has no clue about” is exactly the identity assertion needed to understand the logic the guest represented, that which binds ‘the other’ to interiorize the discrimination and exclusion integral to that logic. The imaginary waiter entered the reality of his own writer over this dilemma, that is, over his incapability to understand the sudden need to label people in a way similar to “putting a stamp on a paper” (Waiter: 32). This is at the same time the situation that paralyzes the writer. Yet, though the war is disseminated only in particles, like an unstoppable reality break-through into the world of fiction despite the writer’s hesitation, her anxiety, feeling of guilt or even a trauma, the waiter’s story is the narrative about Yugoslav nationalisms and war: A nevolja kuca na vrata, znate vi to i sami, zašto biste inače rekli da je mačka pojela papagaja. Odnosno, da bih mogao lako ostati bez posla. Jer kome treba neko ko nikome ne pripada, osim – kako ste objasnili – gradu. Veoma dobro sam osetio kako su te dve reči [lokalpatriota-kosmopolita] odjeknule: tupo, kao kad se na papir udari pečat. (Ibid.: 34) Trouble knocks at the door, you know it very well yourself, why would you otherwise say that the cat ate the parrot. That is, that I could easily lose my job. Who needs someone who doesn’t belong, except – as you explained – to their own town. I felt very well how the two words [local patriot-cosmopolite] reverberated: flat, similar to the sound a stamp makes on the paper. Exactly the situation of that ‘someone superfluous who doesn’t belong’ makes reference to the late Yugoslav ethnonational projects and their counting and labelling discourses that stirred up the war. Though the waiter understands the threat, and is fairly pessimistic about the future, he fails to grasp the ideology behind these projects, and maintains that his national Hungarian and professional identities respectively are primary: I pre ili kasnije će većina nas dobiti otkaz. Ja ne znam da li će početi sa srpskim, mađarskim ili bunjevačkim konobarima, ali verujte […] ako su dvadeset i pet godina zajedno radili, više i nisu svesni na kojem jeziku se obraćaju jedan drugom. (Ibid.: 32)

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

Sooner or later majority will be fired anyways. I don’t know if Serbian, Hungarian, or Bunjevac would be the first on the list, but believe me […] if they worked together for twenty five years, they are no longer aware of which language they use to talk to each other. In conlusion, Dubravka Ugrešić’s already analysed essay “Priests and Parrots”, a paradigmatic text about the problem of writing and (ethnonational) identity, is another possible interdiscursive reference. In Ugrešić’s account the parrot, a sardonic metaphor of a conformist writer, is placed alongside the portrait of a confused, almost pathetic writer of a generic name Petar Petrović that highlights the prevalence of this type of experience. Petar explicitly lacks the skills to successfully reinvent himself in the situation of the emerging ethnonational culture. The situation is conveyed through the repetitive image of a man standing on the border, principally sensing that the reality he had lived in before started to disintegrate, and so “the border crosses the border-crosser” (Schimanski 2006: 43): I Petar Petrović stoji na granici između before i after, između jednog i drugog vremena, između jedne i druge zbilje [...] i drhti. I jasno osjeća: ti koji zbunjeno stoje na granici kao on, čini se nestaju. (Ugrešić 2002: 51) And Petar Petrović stands on the border between before and after, between one age and another, between one reality and another […] and he trembles. And he sees clearly: those who stand confused on the border seem to disappear. (Ugrešić 1998: 36) While the writers who didn’t conform to the rules of the ethnonational ideology principally disappear from the curriculum and the canon, but also from the public by ‘being crossed by the border’ as emigrants, or the excluded, people like Lovas’ waiter can disappear as “a parrot swallowed by the cat”32 : Ali moj položaj zbilja nije lak. Dobro ste rekli, niste uzalud majstor reči: mačka pojede papagaja. A ja se baš osećam kao kakav papagaj. Koji i ne zna šta je mačka, pa za svaki slučaj beži od svega što se mrda. A onda – ili će da ima sreće, ili neće. (Waiter: 29) But my position is really not easy. You put it correctly, you are after all the master of words: a cat eats a parrot. And I do feel like a parrot. The one who doesn’t even know what a cat is, but runs away from everything that moves, because you never know. Eventually – it will either strike it lucky, or not.

32

An English idiom “cat that ate/swallowed the canary” means being self-satisfied about a (bad) thing a person did.

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The waiter concludes that the cat might be that “local-patriot and cosmopolite” tangle (“zavrzlama”), which is the same political discourse ‘jumble’ that left Petar Petrović disoriented on the ethnonational border, and fringes of the society.

II 3.

Totalitarianism and Misogyny: “Zlatna priča”

As already mentioned, besides the critically articulated texts about the late and post-Yugoslav nationalisms, a cluster of the post-Yugoslav literary texts describes Yugoslavia itself critically. A sentimental and melancholic longing for the disappeared homeland is in Ildiko Lovas’ fiction put next to the critical looking back into the “Yugoslavia’s short ‘totalitarian experiment’” (Jambrešić Kirin 2007: 129). Lovas’ story “Zlatna priča” (Golden Storytelling)33 is an account of the experience the narrator has gone through while and after imprisoned in a camp during the Yugoslav Informbiro period (the period after the Tito-Stalin Split, 1948–1955). While a landmark political decision to break away from Soviet dominance enabled gradual political and cultural opening up of Yugoslavia, the nominally progressive politics had been accompanied by the inner political and social restrictions and homogenization, supported by the Yugoslav gulag system the ‘Goli Archipelago’ and its technology of severe isolation and punishment for the alleged enemies of the state. Hence, both the foundations of the Yugoslav most prosperous years and its most disreputable historical chapter fall in the same historical period and merge in the ambiguous image of the past narrated in this story. While some authors even assert that Goli Otok is “in the foundations of what was Tito’s Yugoslavia” (Jezernik in Jambrešić Kirin 2007: 22), there has certainly been a taboo on the topic, first publicly discussed only after Tito’s death in 1980. Nevertheless, the ruthless political violence was never fully acknowledged, nor did the establishment offer an apology or rehabilitate the prisoners, unlike the response in the USSR when Khrushchev in 1956 actually apologized (ibid.: 24). The focus of storytelling is on the female narrator and her prison camp experience. Though not explicitly mentioned, the protagonist presumably served her sentence at the Sveti Grgur island, a labour camp for female prisoners throughout the Informbiro period, founded in 1949, soon after the Resolution of Informbiro, together with the better-known Goli Otok. Even though both islands served as prisons until the end of the eighties, they were used to detain political prisoners until 1956 (one year after the Informbiro period had ended). Both camps, otherwise uninhabited islands, were a part of a broader complex of prisons intended for the alleged Stalinists or sympathizers with the Soviet Union, supposed enemies of the state regardless of their eventual guilt. The unsettling period in Yugoslav history 33

Henceforth: Golden.

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

is in Lovas’ story narrativized as a subtext, an obscured background of the firsthand narrated difficult relationship between the protagonist and her husband after her return from the camp. The story is narrativized over the topics involving the position of women in the society, female authorship, but also the female – here lesbian – desire. Taken together, all the aspect constitute a particular ‘genre’ that points at the marginalization of the female experiences, including those of Yugoslav totalitarianism and the prison camps. The story demonstrates how women were excluded not only from the political discourse by the taboo on the topic, but also from the cultural reproduction as the effect of the “dominance of the male narratives” about it (Taczyńska 2014). After the horror of the prison camp, the narrator feels detached and ashamed in front of her husband. Being aware of her deteriorated physical appearance, she still suffers the consequences of the dehumanizing conditions in the camp that alienated her from a regular everyday life and ruined her sense of human dignity. In general, the relationship with the husband is narrativized through the discourse about the body, though not only as a counterpoint to their impossibility to verbalize their feelings and experiences. On one hand this discourse is introduced owing to her bodily deterioration, but on the other it is a sentimental-ironic commentary on the aesthetic demands of a society. Different aspects of bodily love and importance of the physical beauty (involving the age) are discussed as the longing of the narrator for her lost beauty, and the reason for her insecurity, but also as a critique of the social control of women through the regulation of their bodies. However, while her trauma appears to build the insuperable wall between the husband and wife, a thing they seemingly share is an imagined picture of her “in the arms of a woman” (Golden: 184)34 . This enables the ambiguous status of the affair: while it could be the product of the narrator’s remembering or her lesbian desire, it also points at the husband’s (heterosexual) anxiety. Yet, the assumed lesbian affair involves Ilonka, her husband’s colleague in the illustrious Yugoslav Lexicographical Institute, where the paths of all protagonists intersect. Miroslav Krleža himself, at the time head of the Institute (named after him after his death), enchanted by Ilonka after encountering her by chance in the local post office, offered her a position at the Institute. The narrator and Ilonka also meet by chance, when the narrator followed her husband suspecting he was unfaithful. Yet, Ilonka reassures her and they become friends, comforting each other for their suspicion and jealousy (while the narrator suspects her husband is adulterous, Ilonka has an affair with a married man). The narrator’s lack of confidence resonates in the husband’s assumption about her affair with Ilonka: while she did not feel attractive and beautiful, her husband assumed that she could not be intimate with him because she started liking women after she had returned from the island camp (ibid.: 34

“u zagrljaju neke žene”.

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191)35 . At the same time psychologically motivated and revealing the husband’s unintended cynical reproduction of the misogynist and homophobic scheme in the camp, the alleged affair with Ilonka helped them at least briefly to revive their relationship. Yet, the narrator repetitively states that the two of them “belonged to completely separate worlds” (ibid.: 190)36 , and that they were always “worlds apart” (ibid.: 191)37 . Coinciding with the end of their ‘love story’ and the husband’s soon death, the narrative ends with the narrator’s acknowledgment that her husband despite all might be the only one who could understand the caresses women in the camp sometimes exchanged (ibid.: 192). Hence, the taboo on the labour camp is narrativized along the taboo on the forbidden lesbian love, allowed only as the compulsion of isolation on the labour camp island. Also, the concealing strategies of speaking – epitomized in a diary format of the storytelling – as a response to the opressive society’s control, appear as the confidential talk about this taboo on the possible ‘island experience’. The narrator’s encounter with another male figure, Miroslav Krleža, explicates further the feminist aspects of the story. Miroslav Krleža (1893–1981), the most prominent Croatian and Yugoslav author, was the key figure of the pre-war debate and conflict on the literary left, great ideologist and promulgator of the Yugoslav idea, the editor of the Yugoslav encyclopaedia, and finally an influential political figure. While Krleža is the symbolic figure of Yugoslavism, the one who advanced the avant-garde and revolutionary concept of Yugoslav community and culture (See Brebanović 2017), the narrator reflects a rarely examined gender aspect of the Yugoslav ‘forefathers’ narrative. From the perspective of women’s history Krleža could be seen as a ‘patriarch’ of the Yugoslav gender-hierarchized culture and literature, particularly having in mind his male authorial privileges denied to women, for this story particularly relevant as women were silenced and marginalized after they had served their sentences. Therefore, against the heroic role Krleža had played in the conceptualization of the Yugoslav literature and culture, perceived as a scared figure of the Yugoslav (masculine) pantheon, in this story he would be assaulted from the marginalized yet daring feminist front. Representing the establishment, Krleža as the narrative protagonist perpetuates an act of social disciplining of women, as if to confirm that the narrator is castigated independently of the setting she finds herself in, both in and outside the prison, in the sphere of the private, or in the public: Kad nas je veliki pisac jednom posetio, ugostili smo ga na večeri, pohvalio je jela koja sam pripremila, a ne moje umeće konverzacije. Ili, kad bi i pohvalio moju

35 36 37

“da sam se ja na ostrvu toliko navikla na ženski zagrljaj”. “on pripada jednom, a ja nekom sasvim drugom svetu”. “uvek bili neizmerno daleko jedno od drugog”.

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

konverzaciju, dodao bi da je šteta što ne pišem. I smesta bi se, promenivši temu, obratio mom mužu s nekim pitanjem iz istorije drame. (Golden: 190) Once the great writer paid us a visit, we were having a dinner; he praised the food I prepared, but not my conversational skills. Or when he finally would compliment me for my conversation, he would add that it was a pity I didn’t write. And then he would immediately turn to my husband with a question about the history of drama. While undermining Krleža’s literary authority by ironizing his prominence (“the great writer”), the narrator suggests the blind spots in the Yugoslav progressive socialist society: women were still associated with the private sphere (represented by the preparation of food and silence) and patronized by means of the soft misogyny (Krleža complimenting the narrator). Yet, the most indicative gesture of patriarchal principles is the way the great writer encourages her to write: he supports her to write, while she is denied the right or a chance to speak, remaining mostly excluded from the conversation they have at dinner. The history of female authorship in Yugoslavia helps understanding the magnanimous gesture of the “great writer” as an instrument of women’s silencing: in the situation of the denied speech the suggestion about writing is cynical. Krleža’s frivolous comment that it is a pity the narrator doesn’t write in effect reminds that “unlike their male fellow sufferers, members of the cultural elite, who gradually claimed their right to publicly discuss the Goli Otok by writing romanticized memoirs, documentary novels, theatre plays, stories […] women had neither a model nor a framework for the narrativization of their ‘dissident’ communist experience” (Jambrešić Kirin 2007: 15).38 Though men and women underwent similar treatment and torture – forced labour, starvation, beating and various methods of humiliation – the punishing regime represented “systemic threat to reproductive health and sexual identity of women prisoners” (ibid.: 12). It disclosed the female camp as “a source of biopolitical testing of the phantasms about the elimination of ‘the unfit’ from the chain of biological socio-cultural reproduction of society” (ibid.: 19). Therefore, the working camps were the places of executing “gender politics of producing a trauma [and a] gender differentiated torture” (ibid.: 24), the fact that sheds new light on the issue of the inglorious Yugoslav gulag, but also on the

38

Explicating Krleža’s connection to the prominent Lexicographical Institute might, however, be another sign of the role the cultural institutions had played in the silencing of the political purges. The traces of “totalitarian mentality can be found in carefully censored Yugoslav lexicographic publications. In the Yugoslav Literary Lexicon (1971), for instance, all compromising details and unpleasant experiences of the political purges and imprisonments were erased. Until the late 1960s, writers could not articulate the experience of the Stalinist purges and imprisonments” (Jambrešić Kirin 2004: 128).

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Yugoslav political affairs in general. Gender violence in prison camps signals the ambivalence in the officially and legally proclaimed gender equality, visible also in the subsequent partial treatment of the subject in the public discourse, historiography and literature, as means of further discrimination of the women survivors’ experiences. The feminist emancipation, endorsed by the post Second world War socialist Yugoslav society on the wave of the greater societal and political transformations, inherited in fact from the partisan and communist promulgation of women’s rights, had been drastically revoked after the 1948 Tito-Stalin Split. Deciphering this development as part of the general reluctant and ambiguous completing of the women’s emancipation project, Svetlana Slapšak claims that in this novel situation women were seen as a threat to the political stability, though their support and help during the war to a great extent assured the victory (Slapšak 2009: 295). Not only conservative, but misogynist reasoning too is, according to this author, behind the foundation of the working camps for women: “Yugoslav communists were afraid that the masses of women might favour the Soviet version of communism and turn against the Yugoslav resistance to Stalin” (ibid.).39 Assuming a peculiar psychoanalytical reading of the Yugoslav official politics – calling forth Makavejev’s WR Mysteries of the Organism – this author draws on the negative fantasy about the adultery, fear of women’s infidelity which was to be prevented through strategies of controlling women’s bodies and their sexuality. As well suggesting that the history of prison camps is predominantly silenced, Slapšak points up that among plenitude of works written by the survivors, there is only one publicized memoir by a woman, Ženi Lebl (ibid.: 296). Yet, another author dealing with the topic reveals that besides Ženi Lebl a number of works by women former prisoners has been written and published, but they still remain on the literary margins, without receiving a proper reception, and hence resulting in misleading conclusions of this type (Taczyńska 2014). As already said, the ‘Goli Otok narrative’ was the discourse of Yugoslav dissident ‘male thought’. Unlike the discourse of Lovas’ survivor-narrator, the late Yugoslav dissident Goli Otok discourse, relying upon ‘the totalitarian paradigm’, ended up in the anti-communist and nationalist revision of Yugoslav history laying ground for the late Yugoslav pre-war nationalisms. Taking part in the greater nationalist rhetoric, Serbian authors were prominent authors of such literature, from Antonije 39

In her 2018 novel Škola za delikatne ljubavnike (School for Delicate Lovers) Slapšak maintains her feminist critique of socialism: “U budućem talasu socijalizma, ili komunizma, ako se malo skrati proces, niko ko nije feminista ne bi smeo imati sva građanska prava. […] Tek sa iskrenim ubeđenjem u ženska prava moći će se nešto uraditi.” (In the future wave of socialism, or communism, if the process is abridged a little, those who are not feminists should not fully enjoy civil rights. […] Only a true belief in the women’s rights could bring the change; Slapšak 2018: 362).

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

Isaković’s Tren 2 (Moment 2, 1982), to Dragoslav Mihailović’s Goli Otok (1990)40 . Yet, the totalitarianism critique did not necessarily lead to nationalism and the renouncement of the communist legacy. After the gulag imprisonment memoir by Karlo Štajner in 1971, the public was confronted with Danilo Kiš’s Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, 1975). The collection of stories was written in response to the silenced gulag topic, together with the critique of the society and a failed revolution (the subtitle of the book is “Seven chapters of a common history” [“Sedam poglavlja jedne zajedničke povesti”]). This work stands as a landmark in the history of the Yugoslav literature and culture, considering also the fact that its publishing had been followed by heavy criticism which grew into Kiš’s public persecution. Publically represented as loosening of the tight political rhetoric, publicizing of women’s testimonies was accompanied by the sensationalist interest and dubious fascination, exploiting the “controlled work of the women’s memory for the journalist psychologizing and media promotion of anticommunism” (Jambrešić Kirin 2007: 23). The corrupt logic of the evolving nationalistic discourse maintained the exclusion of women by means of “their victimized inclusion in the (ideological, that is, ethnic) body of the community”, representing the biopolitical kernel of the future genocidal politics. (ibid.: 19). The ideology behind the ‘cultural’ lack of care for the women’s camp experiences highlights more fundamental requirement affecting female subjectivity. The possibility to speak is the necessary condition of the subject construction: “human is not a being of speech in itself, but only the possibility of speaking and winning the right to its own voice enable the appearance of a subject” (Agamben in Jambrešić Kirin 2007: 31). Throughout “The Golden Storytelling” the fear and the impossibility to speak is repeatedly addressed. The difficulty the narrator feels is represented precisely as her impossibility to speak, as her fear of speaking, indicating the trauma, but also the self-censorship strategies. The phrase about remaining silent is infinitely varied: Ali ne želim o tome previše da pričam, samo uzgred pominjem ove okolnosti (Golden: 181) [But I do not want to talk about it any longer, I just mention the circumstances in passing]; znali su kako da nas nateraju da ćutimo (ibid.: 183) [they knew how to make us quiet]; ali ne bih sad o tome (ibid.: 184) [I wouldn’t like to bring it up now]; 40

Though Branko Hofman’s Noč do jutra (Night till Morning Comes, 1981) is considered one of the first books on the topic.

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A govoriti o tome nisam bila u stanju. (ibid.) [I was not capable of speaking about it.]; Naravno, nisam o tome progovorila ni reč. (ibid.) [Of course, I haven’t uttered a word about it.]; Rekla bih, ali o tome nemojte nikom pričati (ibid.: 185) [I would say it, but don’t tell it to anyone]. Synonymic modification of the act is a meaningful bearer of the proportion and a totality of a prohibition to speak. The penal regime in the camps indeed attempted to “bring the prisoners ‘back in’ the pre-political state of the (patriarchal) silence, dependence, fear and resignation, into the chaos of the ‘feminized’ mass” (Jambrešić Kirin 2007: 18). However, the fact that the narrator can express in so many different ways the impossibility to speak conveys also the impatience, her growing rage and a resilience arising from the ban. Being aware of the impossibility to speak, she in fact speaks of the silencing. Therefore, not to speak, not to be able or allowed to speak is what the ‘telling of this story’ is about. Corresponding to speech as the ultimate act of the inmates’ “insistence on the subjective autonomy” (ibid.: 31), the narrator becomes the subject of her own story by producing the text as the testimony, but also as a fictionalized experience. For, isn’t the “discursive ‘transgression’ of Danilo Kiš who merged historiographical, documentary and literary sources when he wrote about the (Stalinist) camps rightly considered a more dangerous challenge to the cultural and political elite than all the documentary novels about the Goli Otok?” (ibid.). The narrator ends the story by replicating Krleža’s gesture. She addresses the readers through a second person figure which accompanies the entire narration by a demand: Pa šta kažete na to? Nemojte ništa reći. Napišite. (Golden: 192) So, what do say about that? Don’t say a thing. Write it down! While maintaining that the writing is a refuge for those who are denied the right or privilege to speak, this communication suggest that women have to write, otherwise there would not be their stories, one of which is the one the readers have just read. A demand placed in the very last sentence of the story and after the recurring ‘silence motif’ has a performative aspect to it, stressed by the presence of the second person ‘external’ to the narration. By her own writing, the narrator has expressed the silence and publicized the silenced topics: from organized violence

2 Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction

and misogyny, to the female body and forbidden lesbian love. The call to write is a reference to the ultimate Helene Cixous’ dictate: And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great – that is for ‘great men’; and it’s ‘silly’. (Cixous 1976: 876) While the expressive sense of the “golden” from the title considers the narrators new golden tooth (as the replacement for the one she had lost in the camp as her health deteriorated), the metaphoric import refers to the idiomatic expression that “silence is golden” (“ćutanje je zlato”). In this story, however, the golden becomes the attribute of the story, and the storytelling. To break through the silence maintained by the ‘great men’ in literature is one facet of this gesture. Another, however, is writing as an homage to the biographies of women survivors of the “Yugo-Gulag”. Their stories have been made public first time in a notable Yugoslav documentary Goli život (Bare Life; 1989) in which Danilo Kiš talks to two women – Eva Panić Nahir and Ženi Lebel. Three of them met in Israel in 1985, and as the director of the film Aleksandar Mandić recollects, the women wished for Kiš specifically to hear their stories. It seems that “they recognized an ideal listener and a potential interpreter in him” (Mandić 2001: 211). Not only that the protagonists in a way found their own narrator, who let them speak not through his mediating writing, but directly, in the form of the documentary interview, but one of them progressed into the author of her own story.41 Comparable to Lovas’ narrator, Ženi Lebel wrote that Kiš encouraged her to write down her camp experience (published in 1990 as Ljubičica bela: vic dug dve i po godine [A White Violet: A Joke Two and a Half Years Long]). After surviving the Second World War as a Jewish, Lebel studied journalism and worked as journalist, but was in 1949 imprisoned for telling an inappropriate joke. When they met in Israel where she emigrated soon after she had been granted amnesty (1954), Danilo Kiš realized he has in front of himself “a Yugoslav female Boris Davidovich”. While in a way the protagonist here appeared as the real person intending to write her own story, she perceived the Bare Life as a part of Kiš’s opus. Ženi Lebel wrote: “Danilo didn’t live to see the Bare Life, his last piece, this time not a literary one. As he presumed, he was the first one to bring the truth into Yugoslav households; he lifted the heavy curtain of secrets about the archipelago called Goli otok.”42 Yet, it is the two women who had searched for their listener, who desired themselves to tell their stories: testimony depends on the “listening of others to

41 42

Mandić explicitly writes that Kiš did not intend to write about their experiences. (Mandić 2001: 211) The quotations and information collected from the web site of the “Yugoslav Jews and friends”, http://www.makabijada.com/dopis/prijatelji/zeni_lebl.htm. [1.2.2018].

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bear witness to what it cannot directly represent or fully understand” (Anderson 2006: 132). Lovas’ story is in a form of a diary, in which the protagonist confesses her secrets but also utters things otherwise forbidden: she has confidence in her listener, a second person figure which is absent from the fable but necessary for the story to be told, that is ‘heard’. Also highlighting the pioneering role of ‘the last Yugoslav writer’ Danilo Kiš (how Dubravka Ugrešić describes him in her essay “Priests and Parrots”) in publicizing the stories of women prisoners, Taczyńska among other relevant works names the testimony of the Vojvodinian writer Milka Žicina. This author kept her writings away from the public in “fear of repression” (Taczyńska 2014), publishing them subsequently only in 1993 and 1998, some 30 years after they were written.43 Lovas’ story may possibly be an homage to Žicina’s experience: notwithstanding the fact that Žicina’s writing was published in Novi Sad based magazines, the whole process of remembering, writing down and then hiding her papers as in an anxiety of authorship, accurately illustrates the post-camp silencing and obstructing of the possibilities for women to articulate and disseminate their own experiences, those that Lovas depicted. This author embedded her narrator’s story inside the ‘great male authors’ complex, to explore the context of her silence, but also of her eventual speaking, that is, her writing.

43

Nevertheless, the first published Goli Otok book written by the woman seems to be Rosa Dragović Gašpar’s 1990 Let iznad Golog Otoka (The Flight Over Goli Otok).

III Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine Neće otići. Majke ne odlaze. One su tu u nama. U svojim sobama. (Tanja Stupar Trifunović)1

To deconstruct the subject of feminism is not, then, to censure its usage, but, on the contrary, to release the term into a future of multiple significations. (Judith Butler)2

Écriture féminine – as the writings and theory of the French post-structuralist feminists – is not only a debated concept, but also a project of feminist literary criticism commonly perceived as historically limited or completed, particularly when understood as a school or a movement. In this sense reading the works of the three authors – Tanja Stupar Trifunović, Tea Tulić and Ivana Bodrožić – through the optics of what Elaine Showalter summarized as the “inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text” (Showalter 1981: 185) is anachronistic. Yet, while from the perspective of literary criticism theoretical concepts and tools do not expire (clearly, they can be reused, revived, reread), the bond – whether read or conscious – these writings create with the écriture féminine could be seen as that necessary disconnection from the present in order to be “truly contemporary” (Agamben in Buden 2017: 347). The ‘writing from the body’ or ‘writing the body’ – which is one possible translation of the term écriture féminine to English (next to the more common but arguably less precise “women’s writing”) – in the three novels offers one particular perspective on the recent past organizing it as a specific kind of experience. Hence, while reading the novels by the three authors as reflections and modifications of the écriture féminine, this analysis also tries to discover how and if something which is historical refracts through ‘writing the body’. 1 2

They won’t leave. Mothers don’t leave. They are here, inside of us. Their rooms. (Stupar Trifunović 2014: 100) Butler 1992.

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While Simon de Beauvoir’s notion of the ‘Woman as Other’ is at “the heart of all French feminism” (Humm 2013: 94), French post-structuralist feminists, or simply French feminists theorized the (psychoanalytical) relationship between language and (female) subjectivity, and how literary discourse reflects and produces this relationship. The three authors – Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous – are in particular relevant for this inquiry.3 Though their responses differ, they all oppose phallocentric language, devising a system of representation that “points to another logic, another way of ‘making sense’ [speaking] an-other language; radically different” (Braidotti 1994: 144). The critical difference is that this practice of writing does not “suppress the presence of desire among letters and commas, negate the unconscious source around which the stories are woven” (Čale Feldman and Tomljenović 2012: 66). This is how Cixous describes the term écriture féminine she also coined. Hence, in the place of reason, universality and logic, the language of the desire, rhythm, interruptions and the female body should be activated/invented. This ever-curious and mystifying correlation of the body, desires and language is part of the French feminists’ register of metaphors – and the source of criticism – but also, it is in practice devising a hybrid, dialogical, non-linear idiom, spoken from the position of difference. For Irigaray this means articulating the language of sexual difference which is absent and negated inside the philosophical discourse, and with and through it envisaging a different female subject. Kristeva also opposes the psychoanalytical theory of subject, by placing the constitution of subject before the castration phase, in the semiotic, “a space of privileged contact with the mother” (Humm 2013: 100). She theorized the semiotic as a space, or a state of the pre-symbolic sensual language developed through the mother-child bond, inseparable from the materiality of the body. This language predates the symbolic signification, but it also exists in the literary text as an alternative, revolutionary possibility of expression generated by the drives, motions and rhythms. Finally, Cixous effects the connection between the language and body by examining the woman’s impossibility of expression, together with the particular language of the body. In her manifesto-like text The Laugh of the Medusa (1975) Cixous writes: “By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her […]. Your body must be heard” (Cixous 1976: 880). By writing, women at once re-appropriate their bodies, that is, the mode of their expression, ‘informed’ in itself by the body, maybe even dictated by it. The ‘body which must be heard’ is the body of the speaking woman Cixous listens to:

3

A common reduction of ‘French feminism’ to these three authors is often criticized. Yet, besides the relevance of their particular theorizations of the relationship between the language and the female subject, that is, female authorship, and with it related questions of writing and the aesthetics, the fact that they are mostly translated authors also plays a role in the choice and the general perception (See: Humm 2013; Čale Feldman and Tomljenović 2012).

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

Listen to woman speak in a gathering (if she is not painfully out of breath): she doesn’t “speak,” she throws her trembling body into the air, she lets herself go, she flies, she goes completely into her voice, she vitally defends the ‘logic’ of her discourse with her body; her flesh speaks true. She exposes herself. Really she makes what she thinks materialize carnally, she conveys meaning with her body. She inscribes what she is saying because she does not deny unconscious drives the unmanageable part they play in speech. (Cixous 1976: 92) This enigmatic wording relates to the behaviour of the hysteric patients Freud has studied and attempted to theorize, but this attempt instead ended up at the “limit, a point of the interruption in knowledge” (Čale Feldman and Tomljenović 2012: 63). Psychoanalysis has “established a doctrine about the failure of the symbolic articulation of knowledge, about the linguistic fissure” (ibid.). Prominent hysteric patients, and two feminist heroines, Anna O. and Dora – the first one ‘inventing’ an alternative language and the other cancelling the therapy – define the concept of ‘writing the body’ as the hysteric’s speaking. As the hysterical symptom finds its expression in the bodily, ‘speaks by the body’, Cixous writes the texts that “record corporeality, elasticity of language, its motion and convulsions” (ibid.: 67), choosing Dora to be the protagonist of her writing. Écriture féminine is in this sense analogous to the hysteric’s speech, and the type of a discourse or also knowledge produced thereby: it is a fragmentary expression, performing what has been supressed, missed out, the crack or the fissure in the language (while Anna O.’s symptoms were that of aphasia, Dora was aphonic). The écriture féminine in this analysis refers to the historical term and the feminist school, but it is also used as the analytical concept, in order to define the enigmatic inscriptions of the female body and desire in the text. Yet, this ever puzzling discourse of the feminist literary criticism possibly contradicts the general historical conception of the post-Yugoslav literary field and the attempt at its historicization. Also, a poststructuralist positioning that enables criticizing and deconstructing the fixed and ‘natural’ identities conflicts the discourse of the écriture féminine which has been accused of being a-historical and essentialist.4 Nevertheless, while being 4

This is the response of the leftist theoreticians like Terry Eagleton and Juliet Mitchell who think Julia Kristeva’s argument is “dangerously formalistic and easily caricaturable [and] pays too little attention to the political context of a text, and the historical conditions […] in which all of this is interpreted and used” (M. Eagleton 1990: 216). Kristeva’s conceptualization of the Semiotic is seen as seriously lacking the political perspective which would recognize that the possible subversion of the Law takes place only “within the terms of that law” (Mitchell 1990: 102). Also, the scepticism revolves around the discourse of the sexual difference, though this is often the result of misreading. As Caroline Bainbridge points out in her 2008 article “Reading the Feminine With Irigaray”: “Irigaray is not interested in defining ‘woman’, but is, rather, committed to theorizing feminine specificity in terms that give due consideration to questions of sexual difference” (Bainbridge 2008: 8).

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aware of Butler’s warning against the reification of sexual difference which helps preserve the binary codification of culture, the aim is also not to censure the subject of feminism, but “to release the term into a future of multiple significations” (Butler 1992). In this sense – whether we consider it a property of feminist theory as a heterogeneous, ‘constitutively open’ discourse (Čale Feldman and Tomljenović 2012: 10) or maybe even a contradiction – these multiple significations mark the history of feminist theory.5 In one of the founding texts of modern (and modernist) feminist literary criticism, A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf’s claim that “it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex” (Woolf 1977: 112) goes along with identifying “a marked sexual difference in writing, [and willingness] to discuss the stylistic differences between male and female writers and the particular awareness and perceptions of the woman writer” (M. Eagleton 1990: 203). Moreover, Virginia Woolf theorized modernism “as the place of difference(s) – in relation to tradition as well as to sex” (Dojčinović 2011: 12). In her Three Guineas she “associated the injustice on a grand scale and she insisted that it was imperative – for the sake of society and the survival of the species – that women’s different meanings should be reinstated in literary (and other cultural) traditions” (Spender 1997: 24). Obviously, “there is a tension between women’s lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body that always mediate those experiences” (Conboy et al. 1997: 1). That is why it is necessary to recognize the importance of the body as an indefinite concept which helps destabilize the binary oppositions, that is to establish a non-oppositional concept of difference (Grosz 1994). The figure of a room in Tanja Stupar Trifunović’s epigraph above points out the female (literary) tradition, and the correlation between the figure of a mother and authorship, by reiterating Woolf’s canonical text: “For we think back through our mothers if we are women” (Woolf 1977: 83). The ‘room of one’s own’ – as a space of woman’s economic and intellectual independence – is at the same time the space of memories and mothers’ legacy. As a psychical and historical bond, it is a figure of continuity, a precondition of female authorship. Jasmina Lukić reminds that the mother-daughter relationship has been the topic for feminists of various orientations, “from the radical Adrienne Rich in the early phase of feminism, over the 5

Comparably, both gynocriticism and French feminist theory, representing two different paradigms, or approaches to women’s writing – though often solely heuristically – have been accused of their apolitical, universalist and essentialist logic. Merry Eagleton claims that though the gynocritical “search for women writers has constituted an important political challenge” (M. Eagleton 1990: 2) it has had serious apolitical consequences. She argues further that gynocritic Elaine Showalter “considers that the notion of a ‘female imagination’ can confirm the belief in ‘a deep, basic, and inevitable difference between male and female ways of perceiving the world’, [tending] to privilege gender at the expense of class and race; and they can too easily become ahistorical and apolitical, presuming an unproblematic unity among women across culture, class and history” (M. Eagleton 1990: 2).

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

sociologically oriented authors like Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow, to psychanalysts like Julia Kristeva” (Lukić 2001: 248, fn 2). Maternal figures are associated with writing and authorship in the post-Yugoslav literary works analysed in this paper: they are formative for the constitution of the female, maternal, authorial self of the (autofictional) narrators. While in these writings mothers are commonly autobiographical characters, they are also figures of a non-canonical female genealogy. A common locus of narration is the group of female protagonists – female family members – occasionally also indicated by the plural narration in the first and second person to suggest a community one talks to. In her collection of short stories Priče – ženski rod množina (Stories – Feminine Plural, 2007) Šejla Šehabović conceptualizes this ‘feminist, female, feminine’ (Moi 1989) idiom and dedicates her work to “her mother, for all the stories she told her” (Šehabović 2007: 7). Though “concentrating on the maternal” bares signs of a return of feminism to biologism (Hirsch 1998: 253), in these writings maternity is also “historicized and politicized from within feminism” (ibid.). The maternal discourse markedly associates the themes of women’s solidarity, female identity and body, authorship, but it also indicates the awareness about the structural patriarchy. The daughters-narrators in this fiction appear as a literary reverberation of what the feminist literary scholar Tatjana Rosić analysed as the relationship between the absent father and the son in the late Yugoslav Serbian novel.6 The author focused on the figure of the absent father “usually represented through attempts of the first person male narrator/son to reconstruct the text of what is assumed to be his father’s spiritual testament” (Rosić 2006b: 435). By building on Derrida’s and feminist post-structuralist theory Rosić interprets the selected novels of Danilo Kiš, David Alabahari and Radomir Konstantinović as texts that contest universalist concepts of masculinity, ‘phallocentric humanism and Authority’ (ibid.: 436, 440). Patriarchy reproduces itself and subsists owing precisely to its consent about masculinity, which is thus, as this author argues, present as a non-discursive concept. Rosić’s analysis shows that the suspicion of the masculine identity emerged as the structural element in the late Yugoslav novel, making ‘potential narrators or writers’ hesitate and actually refuse being either their father’ sons, or writers (ibid: 441). The father’s testament (in form of a letter) has been a pretext of the story/narration which unfolds as the impossibility to fulfil the father’s will. The unwillingness to take over the father’s patriarchal masculine legacy could be that what is symbolically represented as the

6

Based on the author’s doctoral thesis in which the scope is the ‘Serbian novel of the twentieth century’ (Figura oca kao figura odsustva u srpskom romanu dvadesetog veka: poetički značaj i nove narativne tehnike, 2005), the 2006 article defines the choice of novels as ‘contemporary Serbian novel’. It is worthwhile noting that the three novels the author refers to in her article traverse the period of 25 years, the last having been published after Yugoslavia had dissolved: Kiš’s Peščanik (1972), Albahari’s Cink (1988) and Konstantinović’s Dekartova smrt (1996).

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‘unsaid’ in the testament. While the process Rosić theorized can be also read as the writer’s anxiety of influence (versus the female anxiety of authorship), the critical transformation takes place as the sons’ disobedience results in the introduction of the position of narrator/son not as a ‘phallocentric’ successor, but marginal and outsiderish (ibid.). The discourse transformed accordingly, clearly bordering on the écriture féminine: “fragmentary, associative, retrospective and full of reminiscences, with abrupt temporal and psychological shifts, full of puzzling, never explained ‘dark spots’” (Rosić 2006b: 440). Nevertheless, the father-son relationship as the exclusive bond which legitimizes the literary authorship – and not, for instance, a father-daughter relationship – should be also read to reveal that the figure of the writer in contemporary Serbian culture “reconstitutes as precisely – male” (Rosić 2008: 15). Rosić’s 2008 study about the figure of the male writer is grounded in her critical interpretation of Danilo Kiš’s writing, but even more so the reception of his work and a construction of him as a writer’s figure, representing the “lure of the male initiation into the symbolic order of language” (Rosić 2008: 14). This critical view on Danilo Kiš’s literary presence is an aspect of feminist theorizing of post-Yugoslav literature, which is strongly influenced by the work and the ethics of writing of Kiš, ‘the last Yugoslav writer’. While the three authors mentioned above narrativized the son/narrator’s unwillingness to take over the father’s patriarchal masculine legacy, counter-discourses developed by the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav feminists destabilize further the revealed unwavering linkage between patriarchy and masculinity, particularly by associating the two with nationalism and war. Also, a variation of the narrative of the disintegration of the father-son relationship appears in the writings of the post-Yugoslav authors as the unfolding of the father’s destiny along the Yugoslav dissolution and war. Unavailable or missing father – notwithstanding common autobiographical inscription – is the ‘absent father’ in this new context. Though mothers’ heritage is recognized as necessary for the (re-)production of female authorship, mothers also ‘occupy’ the space of absence. However, their ‘disappearance’ is not the effect of the reproach constitutive for the analysed father’s narratives. Together with the mother’s death as the major traumatic event that permeates this emptiness, the absence embodies a strategy of dealing with, or responding to hostile circumstances and environment. While the triggers for the mothers’ withdrawal from the social life – but also from the story – are often realistically motivated family problems and misfortunes, they are also a ‘symptom’ of their femininity. Discussing femininity involves discussing depressive illness, described in similar terms and often identified with the concept of femininity: “Some female analysts [...] have stressed that there are parallels between the concept of femininity in our society and the character of depressive illness, and that the seeds of depression are already present in the development of the feminine” (Zeul 1998:

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

60). Also, while even some of the stereotypical female characteristics like oversensitivity or fragility have been at the same time commonly perceived as the features of a mentally instable man, the limits of normality have been “historically construed in a way which was not gender neutral” (Zaviršek 1996: 205). The situation of mother’s absence as her unavailability, but also illness, and death are recurrent loci of the post-Yugoslav women’s writing. Stupar Trifunović’s novel is an homage to the late mother, while Tea Tulić’s narrative develops alongside the worsening of the mother’s deadly illness. Bodrožić’s autofictional protagonist confronts the death of the father, whereas her relationship with the mother is narrativized through their distancing, and the mother’s gradual closing inside her despair. In Savičević Ivančević’s novel Adio, kauboju, the deterioration of the mother’s mental health after the family tragedy is intensified by the social deprivation and long-term depression. In Tišma’s novel Bernardijeva soba the mother’s absence is conceptual, and among other possibilities it symbolises her abandonment of the compulsory female roles, and ironizes psychoanalytically constructed relationship between the mother and son. In Tatjana Gromača’s novel Božanska dječica (Heavenly Children, 2014) mother’s mental illness and her stay in hospital are narrativized by expanding the mental disease narrative to the psychopathological symptoms of the entire society. A commentary about how “semi-scientific and semi-medicinal analyses of the general disease of space and time came to prevail” (Gromača 2014: 85)7 is a metafictional statement about this analogy, devising the mental hospital as a type of a chronotope. Part of this societal illness refers to the status of truth: to tell the truth means blathering: “Other patients thought that the two professors were speaking nonsense, but it was because they were speaking the truth.” (Ibid.: 89)8 The interchangeability of truth and rubbish is possible in a ‘not-normal’ world, which at once absorbs the difference between the serious and comical. When the above-mentioned philosophy professor, who is one of the patients at the institution, warns that the crimes that are not openly addressed would recur, it is perceived as a good joke: “then everybody laughed and winked as if they heard a good lascivious joke” (ibid.: 91)9 . Denial of war crimes is normalized in a crazed society. Novel Rod avetnjaka (Genus tarsius, 2008) by Slađana Bukovac also associates the society with the psychiatric institution. The protagonist, a young psychiatrist, comes to conclusion that the war is not only a trigger to mental diseases he treats, but that the whole

7 8 9

“poluznanstvene i polumedicinske analize opće bolesti mjesta i vremena uzimaju sve više maha”. “Ostali pacijenti smatrali su da profesor i profesorica govore gluposti, ali to je bilo zato što su govorili istinu.” “potom su se svi smijali i namigivali jedni drugima kao da su poslušali dobar vic pomalo sramotna sadržaja”.

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social ambiance acts as its aftereffect. The ethical questions permeate the narrative, involving the event of the mother’s illness and death. In Vedrana Rudan’s 2010 novel Dabogda te majka rodila (I Wish You Were Born by Your Mother) the ill mother and her daughter, the narrator, are the protagonists of the similar narrative of mother’s deteriorating mental and physical health, narrated over reminiscences from the past (involving the sexual abuse by the father) and the narrator’s feeling of guilt for putting her mother in an old age home. An analogous novel Arzamas (2016) by Ivana Dimić, which won the NIN award as the Serbian novel of the year, pursues everyday life of the autofictional narrator-daughter and her witty mother suffering dementia. A type of a dialogic novel develops as an affectionate report on the mother-daughter relationship in which the mother’s disease intensifies daughter’s feeling of attachment and sympathy. The ‘unsaid’, “a gap that cannot be bridged” (Rosić 2006b: 440) in the ‘counterfather’s heritage’ narratives corresponds to the mothers’ detachment from reality. Their absence from the sphere of socially regular and regulated life into the space of difficult identifications is comparable to the hallucinatory fathers’ characters in the late Yugoslav novel. But, again, the daughters willingly accept to identify – notwithstanding the fact that the contexts and the degrees of this identification vary – with this what is omitted, absent, conceptualizing it as their mothers’ and their own response to the same patriarchal masculinity demands. While a ‘spiritual anguish’ could be seen as the process of “internalization of dominant discourses about the sexes, owing to which many women really start behaving as weak, dependent and ill” (Zaviršek 1996: 204), it can also be a consequence of the hindered and confined possibility of resistance. In this sense, the emotional/mental pain is the manifestation of the women’s seeking for their own autonomy (ibid.). Hence, a withdrawal from reality and narrative is at once the effect of powerlessness and a ‘symptom’ of a desire for autonomy. The figure of the mentally ill mother, “in isolation that felt like illness, alienation that felt like madness” (Gilbert and Gubar 2000: 51), expresses the “unacceptable, the authorial rage and desire and antagonism” (M. Eagleton 1990: 41). Shoshana Felman cautions that insanity represents precisely the opposite from rebellion, but also that the “woman is ‘madness’ to the extent that she is other, different from man” (Felman 1993: 34). The mothers’ ‘abnormality’ indicates destabilizing of the normal, universal and natural, or “coherence, rationality, articulateness” (Lovell 1990: 84–85) at the heart of a phallocentric discourse. The mothers’ absences recur as figures of Cixous’ open space of writing, eternal empty page, writing of the impossible (Čale Feldman and Tomljenović 2012: 67). This ‘emptiness’ in the text and the narrative brings the objects of psychoanalysis and literature closer by revealing their intrinsic ‘ignorance’ – that of the unconscious, and of the inexpressible of the literary (ibid.: 66–76). Also, considering the importance of the hysterics’ speech for the Freud’s conceptualization of the unconscious and its subsequent avant-gardist recognition, the inexpressible that speaks

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

in the écriture féminine’s language of the feminine body and desire in a peculiar way connects to the language of the avant-garde. Finally, Cixous theorized the unconscious as the space of the woman’s suppression (Cixous [Siksu] 1995: 157). The post-Yugoslav écriture féminine bears the women’s absent, ‘confiscated’ bodies and voices along with their reverberation of the (tabooed) war. In Tanja Stupar Trifunović’s novel Satovi u majčinoj sobi (Clocks in My Mother’s Room, 2014) the inscription of the female difference in the figure of the mother and the sensuality of the body makes it an exemplary text of a post-Yugoslav écriture féminine, a ‘flowing’, hybrid writing, which has been also critically assessed. Tea Tulić’s novel Kosa posvuda (2011; Engl. Hair Everywhere, 2017) narrativizes the mother-daughter relationship by relating to their ‘pre-symbolic’ bond, as the source of alternative – rhythmical, fragmented, poetic – language, and by situating it in the wider space of female family. Ivana Bodrožić’s war novel Hotel Zagorje (2010; Engl. Hotel Tito, 2017) is ‘writing the coming-of-age body’, crossed and formed by traumatic autobiographical testimony.

III 1.

Tanja Stupar Trifunović’s Satovi u majčinoj sobi: ‘Writing the Body’ as a Signpost The presupposition of sexual difference […] reifies sexual difference as the founding moment of culture. (Judit Butler)10

Tanja Stupar Trifunović (b. 1977 in Zadar) published her first poetry collection Kuća od slova (House of Letters) in 1999. Since the time, four poetry collections, a selection of columns/short stories Adornova svraka (Adornos’s Magpie, 2007), and the two novels Satovi u majčinoj sobi and Otkako sam kupila labuda (Since I Bought Myself a Swan, 2019) came out.11 Her poetry has been translated into several languages and is represented in numerous regional and international anthologies. Stupar Trifunović won the European Union Prize for Literature for her first novel Satovi u majčinoj sobi in 2016. While the autobiographical experience of exile is voiced only in hints, as a supressed, absent event, the story-telling in this novel centres on the experience of the mother’s death. The writing expands as a “decentred écriture féminine [that] operates with surfaces, its layers slide, there is no hierarchy, that is, it is 10 11

Butler 1997: 413–414. Poetry collections include: Uspostavljanje ravnoteže (Establishing Equilibrium, 2002), O čemu misle varvari dok doručkuju (What Barbarians Think Of While Having Breakfast, 2008), Glavni junak je čovjek koji se zaljubljuje u nesreću (Protagonist is the Man who Falls in Love with Misfortune, 2010), Razmnožavanje domaćih životinja (Reproduction in Domestic Animals, 2018).

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based on the horizontal, ‘rhizomic’ hierarchy, on the atmospherics” (Vuksanović in Radović 2005: 42). Most of this novel’s feminism is contingent on the lyrical style of writing; the idiom of the story is hybrid, in-between poetry and essayistic, fitting well the definition of the écriture féminine as the ‘flowing writing’.12 Though at times retarding the narration which is why it could be interpreted as a type of a poetic digression,13 ‘a flowing text’ is the source of numerous exemplary poetic images: Kada je bilo to popodne koje se rasulo u beskraj popodneva, kada se Bog okupao sam u kadi, a potom, nakon što se dobro osmotrio u ogledalu, odlučio da se razlije u ovo mnoštvo što hoda po ulici. (Stupar Trifunović 2014: 46)14 Upon that afternoon which dispersed in infinite number of afternoons, when God bathed alone, and then after looking at himself carefully in the mirror decided to pour himself out into this multitude walking down the streets. The autofictional narrator – the writer – goes to her mother’s house in the countryside after she passed away, to “make some order”, clear out the cellar full of mother’s souvenirs and belongings. Though explicated as the need for some time alone in search of inspiration, this stay is apparently related to her mother’s material and symbolic heritage. She spends time alone in her mother’s house, remembering the past and thinking of their relationship, while the bond with the present is kept by the emails she exchanges with her daughter. The focus on the female authorship – substantial in the fiction of Dubravka Ugrešić, Ildiko Lovas, Olja Savičević Ivančević, Snežana Andrejević and other authors – defines the story-telling and effectuates the illusion of the text’s progression as the story unfolds. In a metafictional interplay between the narrator’s writer’s block and the text which is yet being written, a multifaceted écriture féminine narrative appears. While the analysis follows the conceptualizations of the sexual difference, that is female difference as a “part of the topography of writing” (Humm 2013: 103), the limiting effects of the ‘reification’ of sexual difference will be also addressed.

12 13

14

This is the translation of the Serbian term “tečno pismo” coined by Biljana Dojčinović (Barać 2018: 277–278, fn 21). The following excerpt is an example of this style of writing: “Sa malo vještine iz bilo čega možeš iščitati kako ljudi dolaze i naseljavaju svijet pokušavajući neudobnost ili udobnost spostevne kože utisnuti svud oko sebe, kao da su sigurniji ako raspu svoje tragove, slični psu, teritorijalni, ne nužno fizički, ali barem duhom, osmijehom ili ljutnjom.” (Some skill will help you understand how people come and inhabit the world trying to impress the comfort or discomfort of their skin all around, as if they feel more secure when they spread their traces, resembling a dog, territorial, yet not necessarily physical, but at least in spirit, smile or anger; Stupar Trifunović 2014: 41). Henceforth: Clocks.

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

III 1.1.

To Meet the (M)other

While the narrator’s individual sense of identity opposes the traditional conception of woman’s roles, it is also constituted through the relationships with her female family members. Major female figures – mother and daughter – are installed at the threshold of the story. They mark the beginning of writing by motivating the narrator to ask herself the ‘female, feminine and feminist’ questions, and thereupon commit herself to writing. A feminist awareness in fact coincides with the narrator’s motherhood, and so the story of the novel is devised also as a feminist lesson to daughter instead of a bedtime story: “Write a story for me, but don’t mention the wolf, he eats the dreams, says the girl.” (Clocks: 8)15 In this manner, the rhetoric of the novel is comparatively didactic, whereby some elemental concepts of the feminist theory appear as a part of this ‘meta-theoretical’ discourse. Asserting that the world was “a male thing” before the girl was born, the narrator ‘turns around’ the most ‘essentialized’ female identity, presenting it instead as an exemplary feminist position: S tobom su stigla pitanja. O majci, o tebi, o meni, o tom ženskom što je proticalo kao tiha rijeka, neimenovano i neodređeno (Clocks: 72) [With you the questions arrived. About the mother, yourself, about me, about the feminine16 which is passing by like a silent river, nameless and indefinite]; Žene. Toliko žena u glavi. Ne znam kad su počele pristizati. Mislim, kad sam rodila tebe. Prije, svijet je bio muško djelo, sa ženama raspoređenim u sjeni. Zatamljenim, odsutnim ili pretjerano radišnim i brižnim. Kao da su bile karikature sebe samih, u porodici najčešće zapamćene po nekoliko svedenih osobina, štur opis (ibid.) [Women. So many women in my head. I don’t know when they started arriving. I think when I gave you birth. Before, the world was a male thing, women stayed in shadows. Those shaded, absent or excessively diligent and worried women. As if they were their own caricatures, remembered by a few reduced characteristics, a poor description]. The concept of femininity is, hence, defined as invisible and indefinite, not individualized and existing only in relation to the masculine. On the other hand, this declared state of affairs about the common ‘feminine traits’ appearing as a kind of a caricature seems to be possible to transcend by exploring the possibilities of (feminist) literary imagination. The formulation “so many women in my head” is a

15 16

“Napiši mi priču, ne pominji vuka, vuk jede snove, kaže djevojčica.” I decided to translate “žensko” as feminine and not female conforming to the discourse of the novel in which the female is discussed and present in its ‘feminine form’.

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figure of female tradition, a conceptual and historical allying of women, but it at the same time suggests a confusion and difficulty with interiorizing other women’s experiences. Nevertheless, the mother resolves this vagueness, personifying the authoritative figure of the narrator’s writing. She is the one verifying the verity of writing: “To write a novel in my mother’s house was not an easy task. She ruled the space. She hated fiction. Lying. Imagining. Why tell a story about something that easily distances from the reality.” (Ibid.: 33)17 Moreover, the discourse on femininity unfolds as an interplay between the three generations of women – the narrator, her mother and the daughter – who by mirroring each other enable an ‘interference’ of their positions. These positions then become more complex and ‘unlocked’: “All mothers hide little girls in themselves, they hide from other little girls, only sometimes, in those lovely days when they play together, when the whole world starts dancing, the girls in the mothers start playing with little girls in daughters” (Clocks: 138)18 . This switching of ‘roles’ suggest the instability of the female ‘generational identities’, stirring up the theme of mothership as one of the wavering issues of the feminist theory. In the second wave theory the mother’s role was generally interpreted and deconstructed against the hierarchized and domineering spaces of patriarchal family and society in general. The early second-wave feminists pointed out “a strong link between women’s oppression and women’s naturalized position as mothers” (Hansen 1997: 5). Yet, later second-wave theory sought to “reinterpret motherhood and revalue difference” (ibid.) without abandoning the negative critique of it. Finally, the third and ongoing wave(s) continue questioning the motherhood without proposing for any kind of consent or a resolution, stressing its complexity and variability anew. The maternity discourse in this novel coincides with this feminist pluralist theorizing about it. The daughter perceives the mother ‘living’ inside of her as a stranger: “Someone else lives inside of me” (Clocks: 7)19 At the same time, though, the mother is someone she herself is ‘made of’, conveyed by the recurring figure of the mirror: “In her mirror I see the same tired woman now […]. She is here. Here. Hold captive inside the mirror.” (Ibid.: 100)20 The mother is both the other, and a familiar part of her own identity, analogous to the identification process in Lacanian mirror stage in the child’s development.

17 18

19 20

“Pisanje romana u majčinoj kući nije išlo lako. Njeni zakoni su vladali prostorom. Ona je prezirala fikciju. Laž. Izmišljanje. Čemu toliko priče o nečemu pred čim lako uzmiče stvarnost.” “Sve majke u sebi kriju djevojčice od djevojčica, samo ponekad, u lijepim danima zajedničke igre, kada svijet zapleše i djevojčice u majkama se zaigraju sa svim onim djevojčicama u kćerkama”. “U meni neko drugi stanuje”. “U njenom ogledalu sada vidim onu istu umornu ženu. […]. Ona je tu. Tu je ona. Zatočena u ogledalu.”

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The process of the child’s ‘subjectivization’ is accomplished through its (always miscomprehended) identification with the “maternal Other”, suggested by the question “What does the (m)Other want?” (Johnston 2018). Obviously, “[n]o one can be at the same time so close and so distant, familiar and enigmatic, like mothers and daughters to each other” (Cloks: 36)21 . The ‘other inside’ could be understood as a rejection of a maternal identity, a feeling of estrangement thereon, but also as a hidden, unavailable part of mother’s personality. The narrator wants “to meet [her] mother” (ibid.: 30), to find out who that woman was besides being her parent. The narrator remembers her childhood, a source of images and memories about her mother that could help her understand their bond. Her diving into the childhood past effectuates her reflections about maternity as a concrete experience, but also an aspect or a possibility of being a woman, and how this relates to a woman’s femininity: I krila to od mene, jer majke kriju od djece sopstveni život zato što svaki život boli. Majke, ti ludi klovnovi. Uvijek isto. Žongliranje između sna i jave. Najbolji svjetski iluzionisti, čije nastupe gledate svakodnevno – majke. Olako izbrišu pola sebe – ženu. Ostane samo majka. Previše vidljiva žena u majci u svima budi neprijatnost, čak i u njoj samoj. Gdje bi s njom? Previše strši. Ne spava. Nezadovoljna je. Sanja. Čezne. Hoda noću raščupana kroz kuću. Čim imaš depresivnu majku možeš biti sigurna da pedantno pokušava da ubije ženu u sebi, zbog zajedničke sreće. Biljka čuči u stanu. U ćošku. Majka. Da, ni mojoj nije išlo baš najbolje. Kćerke u nasljeđe dobiju depresiju, umjesto snage. To je način da ne budeš previše žena kada postaneš majka. To je način da ne budeš. (Clocks: 31) She was hiding it from me, for mothers hide their lives from their children, because every life is painful. Mothers, those crazy clowns. Always the same. Tightrope walking between dreams and reality. The world’s best illusionists, performing daily for you – mothers. They easily wipe out half of themselves – a woman. Only mother remains. If a woman in a mother is too present, no one is at ease, not even herself. What to do with this woman? She sticks out. She doesn’t sleep. She is unsatisfied. She dreams. Longs. Walks around the house in the night with her hair disheveled. If your mother is depressed, you can be sure she tries very carefully to kill that woman inside, for the sake of common happiness. A plant sits in the flat. In a corner. Mother. Yes, mine was not doing too well either. Instead of strength daughters inherit depression. This is how you manage not to be excessively a woman once you become a mother. This is how you manage not to be.

21

“Niko ne može istovremeno biti toliko blizak i dalek, poznat i tajan, kao majke i kćerke jedna drugoj.”

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The mother is described as the “suppressed”, “not existing”, “hiding”, “being silent”, all attributes associated to the motherly role that restrains femininity. Resounding the above analysed theme of (mostly mentally) ill mothers, the narrator diagnoses all mothers with a depression which is a result of their supressed feminineness: “the ‘not-normality’ is typically preserved in the areas significantly marked by the traditional concepts of femininity” (Zaviršek 1996: 212). At the same time the depiction of the mother indicates the status of the feminine which “takes its place with the absence, silence, or incoherence that discourse represses” (Jacobus 2012: 12). Yet, while highlighting a deprived position of women in a household and a society, this account could be also confusing the underprivileged position or a situation of women by assuming an additional component of women’s femininity. While the description highlights and critiques the ‘exclusivity’ of the maternal role, it seems that the effect of almost tangible objectification of femininity suggests that not women, but indeed their femininity suffers. This unintended paradoxical consequence yet illustrates well the ‘universalism’ and the possible stereotyping effects of the sexual difference logic: “There is, in my view, nothing about femaleness that is waiting to be expressed; there is, on the other hand, a good deal about the diverse experiences of women that is being expressed and still needs to be expressed” (Butler 1997: 415). Yet, on the other side, understanding of the female identity in a poststructuralist and Butlerian way as a decentred subjectivity “produced through the relationship with the other” (Blagojević 2006: 48), is also incorporated in this narrative: “A fissure is a wound, a fissure is a woman./ The fissure inside of you can hold the whole.” (Clocks: 62)22 Though obviously referring to unfortunate female history, the figure suggest Irigarayian constitution of the female subject as not complete(d). The mother-daughter relationship emerges as an image of this different, plural female subject: “A woman sat inside of me. On a chair. It was her watchtower. And she observed all of this, backwards, forwards, and the body lying on the bed. A sleepy body. A body that forgot itself.” (Ibid.: 132)23 The ‘fissure’, again, could be related to Irigaray’s hole or lack within the symbolic, suggesting a possibility of femaleness as a ‘non-identity’, as the Otherness which “becomes the repressed term by which the discourse is made possible” (Jacobus 2012: 12). Yet, this un-representability has been clarified as the ultimate characteristic of the divine: it is the god who remains unintelligible and can be described solely in negative terms: Ona bi rekla neudobno mi je. Njoj je svugdje neudobno, neprijatno, nelagodno. Eto, nešto o njoj izranja iz praznine sjedala. Kao da opisuješ božanstvo, podsmijevam

22 23

“Procijep je rana, procijep je žena./ Procijep u tebi jedini može obuhvatiti puninu.” “U meni je sjedila jedna žena. Na stolici. Na sopstvenoj osmatračnici. I gledala je sve ovo, unazad, unaprijed i tijelo koje leži opruženo na krevetu. Uspavano. Samozaboravljeno.”

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

se sama sebi, možeš da pođeš samo od onog što ona nije, da bi možda nekad negdje duboko u sebi osjetila ono što ona je. (Clocks: 158) She’d say “I don’t feel comfortable”. She always feels uncomfortable, unpleasant, uneasy. There, something about her surfaces out of the emptiness of the chair. As if you’re describing a deity, I mock myself, you can try just with something she is not, to be able to maybe sometime feel somewhere deep inside yourself what she is. The fact that the mother could not fit in makes her at once a tragic and a god-like creature. The mother who died becomes the figure of this ‘present absence’, which is also a disturbing occurrence: the protagonist can’t sleep because of the sound the clocks in her mother’s room make (“ne može se spavati u sobi od njih”; ibid.: 207). Kristeva conceived of the maternal as causing both “fascination and horror […]; maternal body as the site of the origin of life and consequently also of the insertion into mortality and death. […] abjection/the abject arises in that grey, in between area of the mixed, the ambiguous” (Braidotti 1997: 65). Likewise, “in her critique of psychoanalysis, Luce Irigaray points out that the dark continent of all dark continents is the mother-daughter relationship” (ibid.: 66). Though the narrator then decides to discontinue the ties between the past and the present by ‘locking’ the past in the cellar where she stored the clocks from the mother’s room, the relationship to the mother remains unresolved. Yet, an unproblematic happy end is effected as her daughter comes to pick her up and take her home, initiating arguably an alternative possibility of the mother-daughter relationship. Finally, fathers, that is men as fathers, are figures of minor importance. The group of non-individualized ‘fathers’ belongs to the outside world rather than the family realm, comparable to the fathers associated with the historical events of the Yugoslav dissolution and war in other analysed novels: Očevi su bili daleko sa svojim ljutnjama, savjetima i potrebom da grade svijet u čvrstim i stabilnim formama. O očevima smo mislili poslije. Kada je realnost počela nadirati sa svih strana u naš uljuljkani brod. Očevi se nikad ne bi složili s tim. On je trebao postati očevi nekad i negdje. Nisam mogla gledati sve to; kako vodi neke uzaludne ratove i osvaja neke zemlje tuđih fantazija, kako gubi snagu i dobrotu i posustaje uokviren u sliku sopstvenog oca. Oni liče, da. I njegov otac je vjerovatno nekad bio ovakav, ranjiv. / Majke su nešto drugo (Clocks: 60) Fathers were faraway with their angers, advice, and the need to build a world in solid and stabile forms. We thought about the fathers only afterwards. When reality started running over into our shaking boat. Fathers would never agree to that. He was supposed to become fathers sometime somewhere. I couldn’t watch all that; how he wages pointless wars and conquers lands of somebody

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else’s fantasies, how he loses the strength and kindness and gets framed into the image of his own father. They look alike, yes. His father was probably like this earlier, vulnerable. / But mothers, they are something different. That “mothers are something different” repeats in the works of post-Yugoslav authors.24 While on one side the fragment embodies the critique of the patriarchal and nationalist discourse behind the war, reproducing the general feminist take on the Yugoslav wars, on the other it feeds on an irreconcilable difference between ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’. Here is where the notion of sexual difference becomes “a reification which unwittingly preserves a binary restriction on gender identity and an implicitly heterosexual framework for the description of gender, gender identity and sexuality” (Butler 1997: 414-415). Obviously, the very “family relations recapitulate, individualize, and specify pre-existing cultural relations; they are rarely, if ever, radically original” (ibid.: 409). However, this falling back into essentialist reasoning is resolved pessimistically, when both parents simply and tragically unite in death: “Our fathers, oh, they are brave warriors. Dead warriors of their dead land. Our mothers, alas, our mothers lay next to them.” (Clocks: 121)25

III 1.2.

Female Difference and Writing

Besides the mother’s narrative, a romance is integrated in the novel as a story within a story. It is an intimate retrospective confession about an affair, effectuated as ‘writing the body’, the connection Cixous “draws between, on the one hand, the feminine practice of writing and, on the other, the female body and desire” (M. Eagleton 1990: 205). Though the rhetorical conventions of the romance are accompanied by the effective repertoire of romantic and sentimental descriptions and figures, an aspect of the style reflects the unconscious as the space of suppressed female desires, and the successive expression of female/feminine sexual pleasure, jouissance “outside the symbolic” (Segal 1998: 269). The chronicle belongs to Ana, a presumably autofictional protagonist of the romance story. Psychological motivation might reveal that Ana enables conveying the intimate story, possibly even a forbidden story, as some motifs of infidelity appear: “My husband is Banović Strahinja, a hero who forgave his unfaithful beloved.” (Clocks: 168)26 A metafictional, that is, autofictional ‘relationship’ with the protagonist Ana is obvious: “From time to time she would gaze at me from a little mirror in the 24

25 26

In Ildiko Lovas’ novel Kamenčić there is a similar formulation: “Otac je otac i kad je mrtav, to nije kao s majkama čije je odsustvo nenadoknadiva praznina” (A father remains a father after his death, unlike mothers whose absence is an irreparable emptiness; Lovas 2012: 68; 187). “Naši očevi, ah, oni su hrabri ratnici. Mrtvi ratnici, mrtve zemlje. Naše majke, ah, naše majke leže pored njih.” “Moj muž je Banović Strahinja, junak koji je oprostio nevjernoj ljubi.”

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

bathroom.” (Ibid.: 65)27 The narrator is the reflection in the mirror, reaffirming her status as the alter-ego of the protagonist (she writes about). Hence, the mirror episode as the moment of identification is interpreted as the acknowledgment of the (female) authorship, and with it interconnected female and feminist identification: For feminists the mirror episode represents the acquisition of femininity whereby the image of the feminine woman is mirrored back to the emerging female subject. Feminist literary critics have shown that women’s writing is rich in mirror imagery which they interpret as an allegory of mother-daughter relations, or relations between women generally, and as an expression of pre-oedipal sexuality. (Andermahr et al. 1997: 167) That the protagonist speaks in first person to her reflection in the mirror explicates the identity of Ana as her alter-ego, the writer’s double: To nisam ja, rekla je odrazu. Odraz nije rekao ništa. Pomislila je da je dobro što odraz ćuti jer je bilo dana kada su i odrazi govorili. (Clocks: 66) [It is not me, she said to her reflection. The reflection said nothing. She thought it was good that the reflection was silent, for there were days when reflections also spoke]; Ko si ti?, govori Ana sama sebi u ogledalu. /Ko si ti?, ponavljam u glavi. (Ibid.: 166). [Who are you?, asks Anna her own reflection in the mirror./ Who are you?, I repeat in my head.]; Šta će biti ako povjerujem sopstvenim riječima i odem da ih tražim, rekla je Ana. I tutnula mi u ruke svežanj papira. (Ibid.:168) [What will happen if I trust my own words and go search for them, Ana asked. And then she thrust a bundle of papers into my hands]. While the chapter is entitled precisely “Ana’s notes” (“Anine bilješke”), the cursive which marks her discourse turns out to be the narrator’s internal monologue. Yet, it also denotes the empathic narration, a mask of the imagined woman the narrator puts on, making a conventional melodrama transgress the genre limits. Narrator’s intimate exploration touches upon the position and role of women generally: the story is structured on the paradigmatic motifs of invisibility, fear, division of the public and private spheres. As already asserted, plurality of women is an essential feminist ‘entity’: “Woman always remains several, but she is kept from dispersion because the other is already within her and is autoerotically familiar to her” (Iri-

27

“Povremeno bi se zagledala u mene iz onog malog ogledala u kupatilu.”

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garay 1985: 31). The name of a textual alter-ego could be read as a generic personal name Ana, which also appears in plural to signal this multitude: Ane u četama hodaju gradom. Neke se kriju bolje, neke gore. [...]/ Ane mi odjekuju u glavi dok pokušavam da pišem. (Clocks: 166) [A whole troop of Annas walk down the streets. Some disguise themselves better than others. […]/ Annas echo in my head while I’m trying to write]; Sve sam izbrisala i odlučila da pišem o ženama, o majkama i kćerkama čija lica ponekad nestaju u snažnom zagrljaju ovih uloga. Nama koje tu i tamo iskrsavamo kao individue, a onda se uplašene same sobom skrivamo (ibid.: 34) [I deleted everything and decided to write about women, about mothers and daughters whose faces sometimes disappear in a strong embrace of those roles. About us who come out from time to time, to hide again fearing our own selves].28 Despite referring to women in the plural, this writing does not debunk the ‘myth of a woman’ as an imaginary formation, dismissing also the possibility to emphasize that ‘women’ are “the product of a social relationship” (Wittig 1997: 313). Moreover, the mirror is a reflection of social demands and body regimes. Body is perceived and produced by the culture that relays on the power “which arises from positioning the female body in the place of object, that is, in the place of the object of the gaze correlated to the shaping of the female identity” (Bahovec 1996: 150). This perception is external and functions as an appropriation of the female body. Not a woman, but society is in the possession of the body, prescribing the body sizes and degrees of femaleness or femininity, which would allow the body to fit in the ‘standard’. This body as the reflection in the mirror represents the gaze of beholders, of others: Nije se još navikla na taj pogled iz ogledala. Jednom će prestati. Možda će čak i srasti s njom, taj tuđi pogled u očima (Clocks: 68) [She didn’t get used to that look coming from the mirror. It would stop some time. Maybe it would even fuse with her, that strange look in the eyes]; Tijelo žene koje se može preformulisati kao rečenica gipko i lako (ibid.: 77) [A body of a woman which could be reshaped like sentence, nimbly and easily].

28

Besides being a generic ‘female’ signifier, the name Ana could be interdiscursively read against Judita Šalgo’s female utopia in her novel Put u Birobidžan, also involving the female name Ana (as the name of ‘Freud’s’ Anna O.). Women in Šalgo’s story intend to go to the end of the world, to a remote and solely women-inhabited land. It is a place near the ocean, involving an image of women residing and dancing near the coast – apparently drawing on the symbolic link between a woman and water, analogous to Stupar Trifunović line: “Ane još plešu kod mora. Osjećam.” (Annes still dance at the sea. I feel it. Clocks: 167).

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

The narrator decides not to conform to those demands: “I don’t look fabulous. I don’t want to look fabulous. I want to look like myself. Only that.” (Ibid.: 82)29 Yet, maternity is a principally corporeal experience which also alters and influences female body. This aspect of maternity in a peculiar way enables the perceptions of women as more physical, or biological, corresponding also to the system of binary oppositions, which, as Irigaray theorized, relegated women to a ‘minor’ position in a binary couple: “Women are somehow more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men” (Grosz 1994: 14). Nevertheless, the same perspective allowed almost opposite identification: creation myths are commonly narrated over female figures, while the mythological Mother Earth is also a ‘woman giving birth’. The “ecstasy of birth, the idea of a mariolatry free of Christianity’s virginity cult” (Segal 1998: 269) is associated to the already brought up metaphor of the absent goddess. This discourse of matriarchal mythology evokes also the second-wave accounts on a matriarchal social organization: Svijet je žensko maslo. Nose ga u trbuhu. (Clocks: 113) [The world is woman’s doing. They carry it inside their bellies.]; Svijet sklizne niz stijenje, skotrlja se prema obali i začne u vodi./ Žena se porađa./ Kad krikne ispusti svijet. (Ibid.: 206) [The world slides down the rocks, rolls towards the shore and gets conceived in the water./ Woman gives birth./ She shrieks letting out the world]; svijet [je] sigurno i toplo mjesto kao majčina utroba (ibid.: 60) [world is like the mother’s bowels, safe and warm]. The concept of matriarchy is demystified by the feminists as “no less heterosexual than patriarchy” (Wittig 1997: 310), since it is “only the sex of the oppressor that changes [while it] does not radically questions the categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’, which are political categories and not natural givens” (ibid.: 312). Yet, evoking this mythical symbolic draws also on the kinship of women in a family, as a counterpart of the patrilineal heritage, indicating the affinity and grouping of women more generally, enacted over the relationship between the narrator and the protagonists. Hence, the motherhood subject expands onto the theme of female commonality, a necessary element of women’s stories and a frequent motif of the women’s writing story telling. Various female communities and relationships become the narrative loci of the women’s writing: Irigaray concludes that patriarchy functions by separating women from each other, and by suppressing the possibility of the maternal genealogy. The establishment of symbolic mother-daughter relationships is essential to women’s 29

“Ne izgledam divno. Ni ne želim da izgledam divno. Želim da ličim na samu sebe. Samo to.”

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autonomy and identity, as women and not just as mothers. Horizontal relations between women – sisterhood – will only be possible if the vertical relationship – the maternal genealogy – has been given cultural recognition. (Whitford 1998: 263) Though fragmented and interrupted, female subjectivity is autonomous, and able to ‘reproduce itself’. The first person feminine plural conveys this ability, paradoxically disclosing the continuity of the ‘non-existing’ female genealogy: Mi smo žene bez rodoslova, od nas i psi imaju dužu listu predaka. Nemoj da se stidiš zbog toga. Mi u hodu porađamo same sebe, između dvije zapaljene kuće i dva izgubljena ognjišta. [...] Mi smo velikim makazama presjekle pupčanu vrpcu i porodile same sebe, upamti to. (Clocks: 73) We are women with no genealogy; dogs have a longer pedigree list than us. Don’t be ashamed of that. We give birth to ourselves offhand, walking between two burnt houses and two lost hearths [...]. We cut the umbilical cord with big scissors and deliver our selves, remember that. The story-telling easily associates private and intimate life with the expressively feminist writing: drawing on the feminist maxim that the ‘private is political’, the text appears as a feminist meta-discourse. The writing is the reclaiming of the public space, whereby the narrator expressly appears as the autofictional figure: To je pisanje. Pokvariće mirnu površinu. (Clocks: 48) [This is what the writing is about. It disturbs the calm surface]; A tebe sam učila kako se deblja mršavo zrnce hrabrosti u nama./ Pisanje je moje mršavo zrnce (ibid.: 50) [And I taught you how to grow a tiny seed of courage in us./ Writing is my tiny seed]. “Ana’s notes” are structured over the quotations from Hannah Arendt’s letters to her friends of a suggestive title Wahrheit gibt es nur zu zweien (Truth exists only in pairs). The core themes of exile, identity, loneliness, and love are mediated by the excerpts from Arendt’s correspondence. Nevertheless, the conscious feminist assignment of this writing is combined with not less conscious imagery conveying the conception of the female difference, as an ‘essentialist’ category, but also a literary image. At times the novel appears as a manual of predictable (liberal) feminist beliefs, distorting and reifying “the very collectivity the theory is supposed to emancipate” (Butler 1997: 414): U kući, u školi, na poslu. Osakaćene, male, lomljive. Žene. Lažne žene. Siluete. Hodajuće reklame za majčinstvo, tijelo, želju. Slike žene. [...] Nisam je još bila otkrila. Ženu. U školi

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

sam bila muškarac, u sportu, na poslu. Samo muškarci smiju da se bore za ono što žele. Samo muškarci su pobjednici./ On ne shvata. Bila sam muškarac. Osakaćena žena./Bila sam pola. Invalid. (Clocks: 86) At home, in school, at work. Crippled, small, fragile. Women. Fake women. Silhouettes. Walking advertisements of motherhood, body, desire. Images of woman [...] I still didn’t discover. A woman. I was a man in school, in sport, at work. Only men can fight for their dreams. Only men win./ He doesn’t understand. I was a man. A crippled woman. / I was a half. I was disabled. In conclusion, while at times this writing falls back to the actually “patriarchal strategy of collapsing the feminine into the female” (Moi 1989: 130), its ‘extradiegetic’ feminism clearly distinguishes and emphasises female authorship, as a cultural and textual category. It also constitutes the space of the feminine as otherness which “seeks to subvert fixed, unitary meanings in favour of plurality and diversity, ‘the multiplicity, joyousness and heterogeneity which is that of textuality itself’” (M. Eagleton 1990: 204–205).

III 2.

Tea Tulić’s Kosa posvuda: How to Write the Death of Mother Mama nikad nije pekla kolače. Ona je pekla ljute rečenice. (Tea Tulić)30

Tea Tulić (b. 1978 in Rijeka) mainly wrote short prose texts for various magazines, before publishing her debut novel Kosa posvuda (2011; Engl. Hair Everywhere, 2017). This fragmentary novel (considered by some to be a collection of sketches) has been a great success, receiving numerous positive reviews and awards, among others for the unpublished novel manuscript (Prozak 2011). Kosa posvuda has both Serbian and Croatian editions, and was translated into English, Italian and Macedonian. In 2017 Tulić’s second novel Maksimum jata (Flock’s Maximum) came out. The author regularly participates in regional literary festivals, is a jury member of international short prose competition Lapis Histrae and a member of RiLit, an informal group of writers from Rijeka. In 2014 she has published the spoken word album Albumče in collaboration with the musical collective Japanski Premijeri. Novel Kosa posvuda can be read inside the écriture féminine ‘scheme’ for its critical narrativization of the relationship with the mother, that is, the confrontation 30

“Mum never baked cakes. She baked her own hot words.” (Tulić 2012: 78. The quotes are given in the Croatian original and English 2017 translation, while the pagination is from the original edition. “Spicy sentences” would be a more exact translation of the phrase “ljute rečenice”.)

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with her death as/and corporeality, and the very bodily aspects of language. It is an autobiographical writing about mother’s death, and as such it is writing as overcoming the sadness, “a way of leaving no space for death” (Cixous 1991: 3), a variation of Cixousian precondition of writing.31 The death of the mother activates corporal experiences alongside the discourse of creativity and writing. Julia Kristeva’s concepts of the semiotic and chora as those spaces, or states of drives and “semiotic motility” (Kristeva 1984) which represent the pre-symbolic signification could be distinguished within this process. This special semantic of a ‘pulsating and rhythmic chora’, this in fact “nonexpressive totality” (ibid.: 40) is the possibility that the narrator finds in the proximity of the mother’s death and their renewed mother-child bond. While the idiom of the novel makes clear why those aspects of language are “identified particularly with avant-garde literary practice” (Jacobus 2012: 12), another significant element of the novel is making up of plural female characters, reverberating the brought up Irigaray’s theorization of the plurality of the female subject. Female camaraderie and female family are figures of this plurality, whereas the mother-daughter relationship is seen and experienced from a twofold female angle too. Hence, the narration does not take place only from the perspective of the child, but also from that of the ‘narrator as the mother’. It is a rare standpoint: “The mother exists only in relation to her child; as object of desire and fantasy she may be idealized or disparaged, but she remains distant and mystified. She cannot be the subject of her own discourse” (Hirsch 1998: 252). The mother-daughter relationship is narrativized over short episodes – sketches of the earlier family everyday life, and their brief encounters in the hospital, intersected with the narrator’s introspective, diary-like entries appearing as a reverse or an unsaid side of the external events.

III 2.1.

Female Camaraderie vs. Real World

The storyteller is principally interested in her female family members, relating simultaneously her own female ‘persons’ as a daughter, sister, granddaughter and, eventually also, a mother. The account of multiple female relationships functions also as an independent discourse of the novel, making ‘femininity’ materialize as a type of protagonist. Female family is merged inside the overreaching mother’s story indicating a particular community, possibly even a ‘separatist’ one, exclusive of men. The narrated reality is that in which the female difference is not the ‘other’, and always indicating ‘its male counterpart’, but is self-governing, takes place in a kind of autonomous space. This ‘female world’ is decided by another almost exclusively female experience: referring to her mother, the narrator says “she has a 31

For Cixous it was her father’s death, whereas the maternal indicated the limit to writing (before she included it in her later texts).

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

red bathrobe and a tumour that affects only women” (Tulić 2012: 68).32 A seemingly detached description discloses the irony as part of the mechanism of coping with grief, but also marks the shift in the narrator’s perception of her mother, that is, a change of their mother-daughter relationship. This relationship is narrativized through the event of the mother’s death, preceded by the deterioration of her physical and mental condition. Comparable to the introductions in the other analysed works, someone’s death is the introductory scene of the novel: [J]edno jutro sam ustala iz kreveta i otišla po Smoki. Klizila sam rubovima stepenica sve do velikih nogu ispruženih na podu prizemlja. Gospodin susjed s trećeg kata sjedio je nepomično naslonjen na zid. [...] Gospodin susjed je ovaj put promašio stepenicu i priliku za novi dan. (Hair: 7) One morning I got out of the bed and went to buy some crisps. I slid down the banisters right down to the big legs stretched out on the ground floor. Mr Neighbour from the third floor was sitting motionless, leaning against the wall. [...] Mr Neighbour had missed the steps this time, and his chance for a new day. This absurdist narrativization, effecting the ambiance of Daniil Kharms’ prose, suggests the difficulty facing death. Though a grown-up woman, her response resembles that of a child, activating this kind of absurdist and uninvolved reaction. The fragment “Mama” (ibid.: 8) is structured as evidence that the death did not occur: repetition of the sentence “on the day Grandma did not die” is followed by the short account of her mother’s visit to the hospital and the death of a young man, beaten to death on the street. The narrator intensifies the macabre atmosphere by concluding that she has always asked herself how the word “smrt” (death) sounded to foreigners, as the four-consonant word. Keeping herself busy with the ‘death’s signifier’, the narrator manages to temporarily postpone the confrontation with the ‘actual signified’, which remains unnamed. The novel also ends with the repetition of the remark about the gravity of the word: “There is no softness in a word woven only of consonants.” (Ibid.: 137)33 The fact that she does not utter the word, but only alludes to it, points at her ritual superstition against death. Again, the negative address of death is a sign of the denial: though everyone positively knows the reason why, the narrator asserts that “no one knows why Mum is in the hospital” (ibid.: 12)34 . Analogous to the hair which is “everywhere” (the hair fallen off after her mother went through the chemotherapy treatment), representing the decay of her mother’s health, the death is everywhere, surrounding her as a self-evident, but

32 33 34

“Ima crveni ogrtač i tumor koji pogađa isključivo žene.” Henceforth the novel shall be referenced as: Hair. “Nimalo mekoće u riječi satkanoj samo od suglasnika.” “Nitko ne zna zašto je mama u bolnici”.

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subdued certainty, causing her everyday routines to become senseless automatized activities: Kada dođem kući, prošetat ću psa. Potom skuhati nešto zdravo i u puno nijansa. Oprati suđe. Kosu. Tijelo. Skinut ću šminku. Zamišljati zmiju kako izlazi iz pupka, tri kata niže, u zemlju gdje ne smeta nikome. (Ibid.: 43) When I get home, I’ll take the dog for a walk. After that, cook something healthy and nuanced. Wash the dishes. My hair. Body. I’ll remove my make-up. Visualize a snake coming out of my navel; three stories below, in the dirt where it can’t bother anyone. Not being able to accept the mother’s death as corporeal experience ends up in inability to bridge the gap between the language and her body, which feels like an object, alien: “Body is something enigmatic that ‘refers to an exteriority beyond/before the language’ […]. Body is […] what escapes the medium of language, what is outside, what makes its constitutive exteriority” (Bahovec 1996: 149). The narrator’s dealing with the death of her mother oscillates between hope and denial; her father and she decide not to tell anything about the tumour to anyone “[a]t least until Mum gets better. Then they can be cross with us as much as they like.” (Hair: 27)35 Likewise, the fragment in which she actually learns about her mother’s illness ends with an unexpected concern about the foam missing on the coffee she bought for her mum in the coffee machine in the hospital (ibid.: 21). Yet, death is permeating everywhere, the memories of the past too. She remembers how her pet turtles died, communicating her rejection to recognize the loss in a somewhat humorous manner: “Don’t ever give me those dying animals again!” (Ibid.: 42)36 On another occasion, when her mum puts on make-up, the narrator says: “You look as pale as death!” (Ibid.:17)37 The idiom slip resounds the nearness of mother’s death, remaining sophisticatedly humorous. Though sadness is a filter through which the reality of the novel is communicated, funny situations – which come about despite the seriousness and tragic of the illness and death – recur: Jebem ti mater! – kaže visoka nogometna suparnica sestri na utkamici za finale osnovnih škola. Sestra stisne zube, skvrči nos i prasne visoku šakom posred lica. Dobije crveni karton i mamin bolnički osmijeh. (Ibid.: 57) ‘Fuck your mother!’ says the tall footballer from the opposite team to my sister at the school sports day. My sister grits her teeth, wrinkles her nose and punches

35 36 37

“Makar dok mama ne ozdravi. Onda nek se ljute na nas koliko žele.” “Da mi više niste poklanjali te umiruće životinje!” “Blijeda kao smrt”.

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

her right in the middle of her face. She gets a red card and mother’s hospital smile. The narrator’s grandma is one of the most humorous characters, an outspoken and incorrect speaker, resembling the matriarch nona in Olja Savičević Ivančević’s novel Adio, kauboju. Throughout the story, the grandma organises her own funeral, declaring on one of the occasions that “her coffin must be suitably solid and impenetrable. Because of all those worms.” (Hair: 19)38 Furthermore, the very interest in the female family history supports the narrative about the mother. As already stated, besides the central figure of the mother, the characters of daughters (narrator and her little sister), grandmother and side characters like aunts, neighbours, and acquaintances expand the catalogue of female figures. Portraying of the individual protagonists is combined with the images of women gathering, making the female communality another important theme of this novel: Mama je oduvijek tvrdila da nona više voli njezine dvije setre nego li nju. Nona bi rekla: – Lažljivice! Sve sam ti dala. Mama je oduvijek tvrdila da ja više volim tatu nego nju. Tada bih ja rekla: – Nije istina, s tatom se samo bolje slažem! Onda bi mama otišla susjedi, nona na spavanje, a ja na ulicu. Tata bi šutio. Brat isto. (Ibid.: 99) Mum always said that Grandma loved her two sisters more than her. Grandma would say: ‘Fibber! I gave you everything.’ Mum always said that I loved Dad more than her. Then I would say: ‘It’s not true, it’s just that I get along better with him!’ Then Mum would go to the neighbour’s flat, Grandma to bed, and I, out into the street. Dad would remain silent. My brother also. Female camaraderie appears in its funny capacity, but it nevertheless reproduces itself through a (consciously) incorrect separatist gesture. The grandma leaves three golden necklaces to her mom, sister and the narrator, adding: “My brother won’t get anything. He’s a male.” (Ibid.:14)39 The designation “he’s a male” is a ‘negative reverberation’ of the exclamation “it’s a boy!”, a triumphant authentication of the favoured sex at birth. Grandma’s preference for her granddaughter counts on the

38 39

“Njezin lijes mora biti dovoljno čvrst i neprobojan. Zbog svih tih crva.” “Brat neće dobiti ništa. On je muško.”

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kinship of affinity, the kinship of women: “You are one of us, tuned to fine vibrations” (ibid.: 113)40 . Notwithstanding the somewhat odd basis of their grouping – as the grandma believes her granddaughter is ‘spiritual’ like the other two women, meaning she can see ghosts – the grandma coherently carries out her matriarchal project. She numbers her granddaughter among “us”, marked by the possessive and capitalized “Naša” – “ours, belonging to us”, again expressing the exclusivist type of their bonding. Obviously, and deliberately biased, the small female family is a gratifying space of sociability, organized around the notion of and activities related to home, the space of belonging that grants the sense of contentment and integrity. Also, it is the (only?) reality which appears to be worthwhile narrativizing, which might be in itself a commentary about the outside world. The spheres of home and family are in sharp contrast to the violence and bigotry described on the streets, which are left on the periphery of the story, conveyed as a rule through the side comments. The public outside the home, while causing distress, remains distant, almost inaccessible. While the outside reality is obviously less relevant for the story, this technique of comprising its bits and pieces suggests that the outside reality disintegrates, and is possible to be retold solely in traumatic flash images. Forging the narrated events as an “aestheticized reality” (Javorski 2012) is arguably also a possibility of absorbing the unbearable real world. Nevertheless, the imagery of the outside reality uncloses with the already brought up fragment about a teenager beaten to death (Hair: 8). Another fragment relates the locals’ intolerance to the newcomers, but also the ruling culture of violence illustrated by the depiction of barking dogs and silent owners (ibid.: 9). An episode from the narrator’s childhood portrays the eponymic “invisibles” (“nevidljivi”). One of them is the narrator herself as a young girl (though the situation resonates her perception of herself as an adult too), excluded from the games the other girls played. She recollects how she would – if she had been allowed to play the cooking game with other girls – make the imaginary cakes for hungry black people, which would surely make them happy back then (ibid.: 20), uncovering the actual meaning of the fragment’s title. Yet, the invisible, or all the excluded are reconnected through the solidarity space the narrator establishes in her ‘postscript’ writing as an adult, assembling various societal others – women, racial and ethnic minorities, the poor. The adult looking through the eyes of a child as a focaliser secures the position of an unaware toddler, and is as such a tool of an empathic focalisation; on the other side, it enables the ironic commentaries of an adult narrator, masked as naivety. This ambivalence contests also the presentation of the historical reality: “This war, it seems, really happened. There is a documentary film on the TV, with footage

40

“Ti si Naša, ugođena na fine vibracije.”

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

from 1941. Unlike all previous versions, this massacre is in colour.” (Ibid.: 62)41 The recent war is only indicated by mentioning the Second World War and a sarcastic comment about the “massacre in colour”, that is, the contemporary one. Likewise, the other – and the last – reference to the war is an anecdote about the grandma who allegedly hid the Jewish women under her skirt in the camp. The narrator’s brother reacts: “You could hide a tank under such a big skirt” (ibid.: 64)42 . The prevailing sense of the anecdote is a punch line comment on the granny’s assumed corpulence, without paying much attention to her compassion and finally the fact that the anecdote did happen during the war. Again, the fragments about the war are narrated in a detached, practically fictional mode: the protagonists relate to it over a TV program or in an anecdote from the past. While reflecting a traumatic experience (a denial or incapability to face the war as the traumatic event), this disregard in fact reflects the earlier mentioned distinction between the public and the private. Kosa posvuda unfolds as the narrativization of this distinction: public is where the injustice takes place, external world is violent and hypocritical to the point when it becomes impossible to narrate. It is brimming with absurd and the absurd death (from that violent death of a teenager, to a dead bird on the terrace, and even the story about the Japanese fishermen killed by the cow in the middle of the ocean; ibid.: 80).43 The public/private divide has been as well communicated over the critique of the social gap in the fragment “Atomobili” (Cars, ibid.: 84), but also by stressing the influence the church has in the society. The narrator remembers her catechism lessons and the intimidating biblical commandments that caused feelings of shame and inadequacy. Nevertheless, the fragment ends in the description of her keeping a colourful book (presumably an illustrated Bible for kids) under her pillow, not really knowing if it was a right thing to do, for “Nothing was written in the book about keeping secrets.” (Hair: 29)44 Silence as a hypocritical doctrine of the church is opposed to the feminist demand to overcome the state of being silent, and silenced, that is, to speak. The narrator’s mother is this speaker.

41 42 43

44

“Ovaj rat se, čini se, zaista desio. Na ekranu je dokumentarac sa snimkama iz 1941. godine. Za razliku od svih prijašnjih verzija, ovaj masakr je u boji.” “Pa mogla je i tenk pod tolikom suknjom!” In her review of the novel, the critic Irena Javorski differentiates between the two main narrative plans: the first one narrating the mother’s anticipated death and how it is interwoven with the relationship to the female family members, and the secondary plan as designating the reality “outside death”, the “everyday life of absurd” which the critic – following the narrator herself – associates with Daniil Kharms (Javorski 2012). “u knjizi nije pisalo ništa o prešućivanju”;

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III 2.2.

Back to Chora? On Mother and Writing

Contrary to the cultural expectations, the narrator’s mother “never baked cakes. She baked her own spicy sentences.” (Ibid: 78). Her unwillingness to bake is in itself already pretty rebellious, yet instead of conforming to the practice of ‘performing’ the gender, the mother masters the competence of speaking. The mother is the narrator’s feminist educator. Back in childhood she sun bathed topless to the girl’s shame: while she desired her mother to be “like all other mothers”, her mum mocked her for wearing the shiny shoes “like all other girls”. The mother demonstrates how being a feminist means being a nonconformist, as the fragment ends in a reminiscence of her mother giving her a short haircut, proudly yelling out: “You’re my little punk” (ibid.: 40).45 The recollection of the anecdotes from the past is a restaging of their motherdaughter relationship as it used to be in the childhood. The narrator faces mother’s illness and becomes aware of her impending death by reliving their rudimentary child-mother relationship. The regression to a ‘version’ of herself as a little girl does not suggest merely her inability to cope with the death of the mother. The quick passing away of the mother prompts the sense of, and the need to experience again the earliest mother-child bond. Kosa posvuda narrates this experience difficult to put into words, intensified by the situation of the mother’s anticipated death: “While they are putting her in the hole, I become a three-year-old and three-year-old thoughts sink onto my shoulders.” (Ibid.: 132)46 Feeling of attachment manifests as a separation anxiety, reoccurring as the narrator’s response to her mother’s death. The psychoanalytical interpretation here is supported by the narrator’s own psychoanalytical treatment of the problem: “I tell him [a psychiatrist] I am afraid to fall asleep. I tell him that my women are dying” (ibid.: 133)47 . The connection between the daughter and mother is expressed by the metaphor of the umbilical cord; the weariness of the figure is absorbed by the intensive bodily feeling of belonging: “While I watch her lying in bed, I can feel the umbilical cord between us. Something I have tried to cut a thousand times already. And now I hold onto that invisible cord as though I were hanging from a bridge.” (Ibid.: 98)48 Separation from the mother, necessary and inevitable at young age, is restaged over the feeling of regret and a desire to reverse the separation, and instead recuperate and conserve the child’s connection to mother. Not only that this relationship is the primary bodily experience, but the mother-child relationship happens inside the corporeal, it is inseparable from it. Corporal connectedness to mother 45 46 47 48

“Ti si moja mala pankerica”. “Punk-rocker” is closer to the original “pankerica”. “Dok ju stavljaju u rupu, postajem trogodišnje dijete i trogodišnje misli tonu mi u ramena.” “Ja mu [psihijatru] kažem da se bojim zaspati. Da moje žene umiru”. “Dok ju gledam kako leži u krevetu, između nas osjećam pupkovinu. Nešto što sam pokušala sama presjeći već tisuću puta. A sad se držim za taj nevidljivi konop kao da visim s mosta.”

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

– over umbilical cord and later during nurturing – is vital in the development of the child. Hence, the negative assessment of the fact that death in this novel is almost exclusively experienced over the decaying body, that this experience is “external” (Javorski 2012), could be read differently. On one side, owing to the mentioned physical connection, and the approaching impossibility of experiencing it ever again, at least from the perspective of a child, makes the perception of death almost necessarily physical. On the other, the above mentioned impossibility of the narrator to accept this appears as a kind of not-interiorized emotion. But, the gradual transformation of the perception, and development of the ‘new old’ motherchild relationship would change this feeling of void, inaccessibility of the corporeal as the motherly. A strong, conclusive character of the bodily bond with the mother is experienced most strongly in the earliest stage of development when a child exists in union, “in a dyadic possibility of child with a mother” (Mitchell 1990: 101). This is Kristevian realm of the semiotic, the “precondition of the symbolic” (Kristeva 1984: 68), established through the very connection with the mother: the mother’s body “mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora, which is on the path of destruction, aggressivity, and death.” (ibid.: 22). Chora is “a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated” (ibid.: 25). The mother death is this situation in which the pre-Oedipal, the semiotic, which has its own logic of ‘expression’, is recreated: “The semiotic is articulated by flow and marks: facilitation, energy transfers, the cutting up of the corporeal and social continuum as well as that of signifying material, the establishment of a distinctiveness and its ordering in a pulsating chora, in a rhythmic but nonexpressive totality.” (Kristeva 1984: 40). The semiotic is the source of non-verbal, rhythmical and bodily sensations, which applies to the narrator’s mother inability to speak due to her illness. Mum who used to “bake spicy sentences” now writes on the paper, not being able to talk clearly anymore. She eats baby food (I ate biscuits with milk; Hair: 52); she would like to eat chocolate pudding (ibid.: 60) because she can’t swallow normally.49 It’s a forceful return to childhood (ibid.: 60). The loss of mother’s capacity to speak, her best weapon, is reported without pathos and regret. In the fragment “Hou doa” (Wanna Oh Ohm) – “Hoću doma” (I want to go home) – mum utters: “Onna os urtin! Ook unch! Faat ou! Ake me!!! [...] She wants to wash her curtains. The

49

“jela sam kekse s mlijekom”; “kako bi htjela jesti čokolino”. Čokolino is a baby porridge. In Vedrana Rudan’s novel Dabogda te majka rodila the narrator also mentions Čokolino as one of the few remaining foodstuff her mother eats in the old age home. (Rudan 2010: 77).

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rest, I don’t understand.” (Ibid.: 51)50 To tidy up the house, make lunch, dye her hair – all stereotypical housewife’s ‘duties’ – reappear here as the mother’s love for life, recollection of its simple everyday and even routine activities. Everyday life is precisely what was interrupted in this story, which is why it is conveyed as fragmented, stream of consciousness trope: “In the neighbourhood of gaudy façades, prize-winning gardens hide cold benches.” (Ibid.: 9)51 The mother’s gibbering as the fragmented, affectionate, intense bodily discourse still finds its way to the daughter’s understanding, as they are both back to the pre-oedipal, semiotic stage, “the pre-Oedipal phase of rhythmic, onomatopoeic babble which precedes the Symbolic but remains inscribed in those pleasurable and rupturing aspects of language” (Jacobus 2012: 12). The mother’s loosing of ability to speak is the sign of their reunification in the chora, and at the same time, the sign pointing up the source of the narrator’s imagination, of her writing. Particular formal characteristics, but also a type of the aesthetic emerge from the semiotic. Kristeva describes the writing of the semiotic as that which “occurs in literature as a pressure on symbolic language: as absences, contradictions and moments in a literary text” (Humm 2013: 101). Together with the other already mentioned aspects, a non-linear and rhythmical structuring of the novel, what makes it also a collection of sketches, effectuates the story of the novel as a cinematic event. Finally, Kristeva also argues that great writers are those who can immerse their readers in the semiotic. She sees the task of critics as finding this “crisis in the symbolic function of literature itself” (ibid.). That the mother and daughter are in the space in which the “pre-divided child, the heterogenous child, the pre-Oedipal child, exists with its own organisation, an organisation of polyvalence, of polyphony” (Mitchell 1990: 101), makes their ‘reunion’ present also a possibility of alternation of mother’s and daughter’s roles. The daughter becomes the mother’s mother: Sve mi je dala. Zadnjih deset kuna iz novčanika. Masažu tijekom onih dana. Mali grudnjak. Slatki mladi krumpir sa batačićima. Cigarete. Ispričnicu za temperaturu trideset i sedam. Marelicu sa šlagom. Crnu olovku za oči. Nizozemsku. Kamilicu. Frizerku. Haljinu na Mickey Mousea. Sve mi je dala. Umjesto toga joj kažem:/ – Što si tako živčana? [...] Pusti me da ti pomognem oprati kosu. Da ti operem šalicu. Nemoj pušiti. Ti si sad moje dijete. (Hair: 41) She’s given me everything. The last banknote from her purse. A massage during those days. A training bra. Sweet potatoes with drumsticks. Cigarettes. An excuse note for school when I had a temperature of thirty-seven. Apricots with cream. A 50 51

“Hou ouat taviete! Kuat uak! Faat ou! Voi me! […] Želi oprati zavijese. Ostalo ne razumijem.” Presumably, mother says: “Hoću oprat zavijese. Kuvat ručak! Farbat kosu! Vodi me”. “U Naselju fasadnog nasilja novčano nagrađeni vrtovi kriju hladne klupe”.

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black eyeliner pencil. A trip to the Netherlands. Chamomile tea. A hairdresser. A Mickey Mouse dress. She’s given me everything. Instead of that, I ask her: ‘Why are you so edgy?’ [...] Let me help you wash your hair. Let me wash your cup up. Don’t smoke. You’re my child, now. The closeness of the two is conveyed by the recollection of mundane details and parallel ‘disposing of’ the sediments of the everyday life and its routines, to reveal the rudimentary mother-daughter relationship. Nevertheless, their (re-)connection denotes the commonality of women generally, objectified also over inheriting female traits, and continuing female tradition of the family: “What is it that makes me you?” (Ibid.: 115)52 The narrator once got a brochure from a suspicious street preacher that taught about appropriate sexual conduct. Though obviously representing a religious sect’s viewpoint, the episode suggests the cultural discourse that upholds and reproduces the puritan discourse on the (female) body: Piše tamo da je voditi ljubav isto što i biti životinja. Piše kako svi to moramo izbjegavati kako bi se produhovili. Toliko da se više ne moramo ponovno rađati. Što ako se svi toliko produhove da tijekom života ne rode djecu? Kako će se inkarnirati onaj posljednji čovjek na svijetu kome to još uvijek treba? Kako onda mogu roditi svoju mamu, ako se ne seksam? (Ibid.: 56) It says that to make love is the same as to be an animal. It says we must all avoid this so that we can become more spiritual. So spiritual so that we will no longer have to be born again. What if we all became so spiritual that no more children are born? How would the last person on earth, for whom it was still necessary, be reincarnated? How can I give birth to my mother, if I don’t have sex? Yet, the female body, autonomous and sexualized, spontaneously surfaced pointing up the ideological fallacy. In a curious twist the narrator closes the line of questions by saying “How can I give birth to my mother, if I don’t have sex?”. Apparently, these women reproduce themselves, expanding the very meaning of maternity. Their rebirth occurs as remembering of the predecessor women, those who “touch one another” even after their deaths, but also, as the ‘taking on’ of the maternal ‘part’: Tjeram ih na rani počinak. Bune se. Ja ih ljubim. Poslije deset navečer sve žene u mojoj obitelji spavaju. Neke ispod borova, neke ispod lampe. Bose ili s cipelama na nogama. Spavaju. Ponekad se i dotaknu./ Ujutro mi ova djeca guraju svoju kosu u nos. (Ibid.: 136).

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“Što je to što mene čini tobom?”

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I make them go early to bed. They object. I kiss them. After ten o’clock at night all the women in my family are sleeping. Some under the pine trees, some under lamps. Barefoot or with shoes on their feet. They are sleeping, and sometimes they touch one another./ In the morning these children push their hair into my nose. Kosa posvuda captures maternity as the self-identity “in terms of radical alterity”, as the arrival of the child “leads the mother into the labyrinths of an experience that, without the child, she would only rarely encounter: love for an other” (Kristeva 1997: 212). That the “self can never be entirely separated from the other” (Fenves 1998: 189) can be conceptualized as the possibility of this special kind of ‘plurality’. Describing a perfect day with the mother in a mini-chronotopic image of the “small crowd” (“small plurality”) is an iconic image of the relationship between children and their mothers: Ja bih ljetovala na pedalinama. Sretna u maloj množini. Mama bi sunčala svoje male grudi, a ja bih vrtila pedale. Taj dan bi jeli sendviče i sladoled. Ne bih nikada ljetovala na kruzeru. Duša se ne liječi na jednom od tisuću malih prozorčića. Dušu pustiš da toča nogu u moru. Dušu pustiš mami na čuvanje. (Hair: 119) I would go on a paddle boat for my summer holidays. Happy in that small plurality.53 Mum would sunbathe her small breasts, and I would turn the pedals. That day we would eat sandwiches and ice cream. I would never go for summer holidays on a cruise ship. You can’t heal your soul at one of a thousand small windows. You let your soul dip its foot into the sea. You let Mum keep your soul.

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Perhaps a more accurate translation would be: “in the small crowd”.

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III 3.

Ivana Bodrožić’s Hotel Zagorje: The Death of the Father and the Coming of Age as the War Novel Vukovar je pao i to me muči jer nisam sigurna što to točno znači, a glupo mi je sada pitati. (Ivana Bodrožić)54

Ivana Bodrožić (b. 1982 in Vukovar) published her first poetry collection Prvi korak u tamu (A First Step in the Darkness) in 2005. After this volume, awarded distinguished literary prizes Goran and Kvirin and translated into Spanish, she published the acclaimed novel Hotel Zagorje in 2010 (Engl. Hotel Tito, 2017). Having its Croatian and Serbian edition, this novel has been reprinted many times, including the newest 2020 edition, translated into many languages and awarded numerous prizes (among others the Kiklop for the best prose work). Together with the film director Jasmila Žbanić, Bodrožić wrote a script based on the novel, while it was staged in Gavella theatre in Zagreb in February 2020. Since the first novel, the author published a book of poetry Prijelaz za divlje životinje (Overpass for Wild Animals) in 2012, collection of columns Za što sam se spremna potući (For What Am I Ready To Fight) in 2013 and a collection of short stories 100 % pamuk (100% cotton) in 2014. Her second novel Rupa (Hole) came out in 2016. In 2019 the author published a children’s book Klara Čudastvara (Klara The Miracle-Maker). The author regularly publishes in literary journals and her poetry has been included in several anthologies. Her autobiographical novel Hotel Zagorje also narrativizes the situation of facing the death of a parent – the father. Due to the circumstances of this death, the narration overgrows the confines of the private sphere. The dynamics of the story are dictated by the war expansion in Croatia in the beginning of the 1990s and the subsequent homelessness and poverty of the protagonist’s family. Unlike Tea Tulić’s subsidiary mention of reality outside the home, war is decisive for the story of the Hotel Zagorje, acting as its factual scenery. The novel fits the corpus of works about the Yugoslav wars written by women authors, in which the autobiographical and the war genre fuse transposing the “gendered experience of war” (Kobolt 2006: 314). Since these narratives have markedly autobiographical features, the ‘war literature’ writing is necessarily informed by the autobiographical function of the verification 54

“Vukovar has fallen and this is bugging me because I’m not sure what it means exactly, and I feel stupid asking.“ (Simić Bodrožić 2010: 12. The quotes are given in the Croatian original and English 2017 translation, while the pagination is from the original edition. For the legibility quotes from the novel will be henceforth referenced only by a page number.) Again, the novel has been published under the name Ivana Simić Bodrožić, but the author shall be referenced by her current last name.

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of writing and the question of authorship (ibid.). Yet, the autobiographical factuality is a challenging aspect of this work, often misinterpreted by the literary critics overwhelmed by the autobiographical information ‘spectacle’. The criticism is consumed by the repetition of historical or autobiographical certainties, while it omits some other – but with the autobiographical elements interrelated – aspects, like its écriture féminine textuality and the mimetic transposition of the war. In a debate about the women authors and literature, literary criticism and awards organized during the Leipzig Book Fair 2014, Bodrožić retold a conversation with one of the publishers who advised her not to write a novel about the war, but instead about a girl growing up, suggesting that only after she had won the hearts of her female readership, could she more freely select the topic of her writing. The conversation the author retold makes clear how gender stereotypes reproduce in the literary field, that is, that the genre is clearly defined by the gender. Narrating the war from the female perspective appears inadequate: “the authorship of war literature is constructed as male. The writings of female authors are by rule disregarded when the genre is defined in such a way […]. As if there are no women in war.” (Kobolt 2006: 297). 55 Finally, the reception of the novel, together with the acclaim and prizes, was also accompanied by the often misogynist comments and a kind of public ostracism for the author’s ‘intrusion’ into the patriotic sanctity. Similarly unfavourable was part of the reception of Bodrožić’s second novel Rupa (2016) in which the author through the genre of the political thriller unmasked the corrupt and criminalized ‘transitional’ Croatian society. Hotel Zagorje is a story about the lost home and the murder of the father in war, constitutive for the protagonist’s coming of age. Narrativized reality is complex and conflicting, integrating documentary and bizarre images of the irregular everyday life. Perception of home and belonging alternate against the backdrop of the refugee life in various provisional lodgings that end in the hotel accommodated to serve as the collective centre. The narrative is an asymmetrical story about the asymmetrical growing up. The focalisation is an essential device for conveying the irregularity of everyday life: it draws from the perspective of an adult – the autofictional narrator – who recollects the past events as a maturing girl (from the age of nine to puberty), engendering manifold and ambiguous viewpoints. Most of the reviewers critiqued the alleged incoherence of the narration, the author’s lack of good writing skills, or even paradoxically interpreted the author’s technique as the calculated strategy aimed at manipulating the readership.56 However, owing to 55

56

Texts by Nirman Moranjak-Bamburać are invaluable contributions to the theorization of the women’s writing, experiences of war and the position of female authorship inside the masculine Symbolic order (“Signature smrti i etičnost ženskog pisma”, 2003; “Ima li rata u ratnom pismu?”, 2004). A suggestion by Marija Ott Franolić in her otherwise benevolent analysis (Ott Franolić 2012) illustrates well the general discomfort of both academic and literary critics about the ‘un-

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

different narrator’s personas the narrated events are conveyed in their complexity, displaying a precise and scrupulous author’s control over the story. One of the narrator’s faces is a little girl who can’t grasp the disruption of the everyday life as she knows it, which results in the naturalization of the deviated war reality which has horrifying effects: Onda smo jednog dana čuli da su stari ubijeni. Tako smo zvali tatine roditelje. Zaklani. Tu riječ sam dobro čula. (11) [Old folks. That’s what we called Papa’s parents. Then one day we heard they had been killed. Throats slit. I heard the words distinctly]; Baba se ipak spasila preko Novog Sada i Mađarske, a samo su dedu zaklali. Ona je neko vrijeme boravila u podrumu s komšinicom Maricom koju su Srbi silovali i pucali joj u jedno oko. Babi se ništa nije dogodilo. (13–14) [Granny had escaped, after all, through Novi Sad and Hungary, it was only Grandpa whose throat was slit. For a time she stayed in a cellar with her neighbour Marica whome the Serbs had raped and shot in the eye. Nothing happened to Granny]; Ispostavilo se da su u njihovom dijelu grada bili bolji četnici koji nisu baš sve pobili, nego su ih samo natjerali da potpišu papir na kojem piše da im poklanjaju kuću. (22) [It turned out that in their Vukovar neighbourhood the Chetniks were a little better and didn’t kill every last person, they just made them sign away their house.] The girl-narrator integrates what she hears and sees into her daily life, growing into a focaliser who effectively – adapting the technique of automatic writing – reflects the abnormality of living in an atrocious war-time reality.

III 3.1.

To be a Refugee: Internalization and Reproduction of Enmity

The discourse of home develops inversely throughout the story: it is the narrative about not having a home. A home remerges and disappears with the broken family (mother, older brother and the narrator) moving from one collective centre to another, functioning as a space of discontent and fear rather than a haven which could protect them from the outside harsh reality. Text of the novel is composed as reliable’ narrator. At the same time recognizing the author’s attempt to ‘write the trauma’ most of the critics stress the unconvincing narrator’s voice (Radić 2010), suggesting that if “the rough surfaces of the perspective and dramaturgy were polished, the result would be an excellent and moving novel” (Ćirić 2011), concluding that the “choice the author made about her discourse is not the best, namely it is too infantile” (Pavlović 2010).

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an archive of family’s letters to various institutions asking for a decent accommodation. While displaying a gradual disillusionment with the state as the formerly idealized guardian of its nationals, the correspondence gets across the necessity of having a home. The home comes forth as the question of life and death: “we’d agree to anything [...] just so we had home” (155)57 . Yet, to have a home involves also having the whole family gathered again, locating the need for home into the sphere of impossible desires, wishes, together with the possibility that the father is still alive: Postoje dvije rečenice koje žive negdje na nebu, one čarobne, a opet tako poznate, jer ih stalno izgovaraš u sebi. Ipak, ne znaš zapravo kako zvuče jer ih nikada nisi čuo ni izrekao naglas. Jedna je Tata je živ, a druga Dobili smo stan (153–154). There were two sentences that lived somewhere in the sky, magical yet so familiar, because you’d said them over and over. Still, you don’t really know what they sound like, since you’ve never heard or uttered them out loud58 . One of them was Papa’s alive, the other: We got an apartment. Home as imaginary space suggests the narrator’s family powerlessness and deprivation; it apparently exists only in dreams, therefore obtaining it seems similarly effortless: “One evening my uncle came home and told my mother there was an empty apartment in New Zagreb. All we had to do was break in.” (13)59 The girl’s non-discriminating perception produces sarcasm, a provisional counterbalance for the lost home, though the easy acquisition of someone else’s flat was a common practice throughout the Yugoslav war zones. A conflicting compensation has not been perceived as wrong in the already twisted standard of living: the family would inhabit the apartment only temporarily, to add it – together with the collective centres – to their list of provisional homes. Being ‘displaced’ is producing not only the feeling of being unprotected, but it in effect rationalises the desire of other people they encounter to demonstrate their privileges. From the treatment they received from their relatives they briefly lived in Zagreb, to the reactions in the public, the narrator’s family is forced to understand and accept that they have been ‘naturalized’ as refugees, hence being lesser social and human beings. “This is my house, I go first” (9)60 , says a host girl to her cousin refugee when she tries to use the bathroom first. A woman in a tram is outspoken about her prejudice:

57 58 59 60

“Pristat ćemo [...] na sve, samo da imamo dom”. Since the sentence is omitted in the English edition the translation is mine. “Jedne večeri tetak je došao s posla i rekao mami da ima jedan prazan stan u Novom Zagrebu. Treba samo provaliti.” “Ovo je moja kuća, ja idem prva”.

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

Jednom smo u Caritasu dobili punu torbu slatkiša i teglili je prema Črnomercu u tramvaju prepunom ljudi. Dotjerana gospođa u našim kolima rekla je kolegici da to izbjeglice rade gužvu jer se po cele dane vozaju sim tam. Pogledala sam ju i nasmiješila se jer sam znala da smo mi prognanici, a da su izbjeglice iz Bosne. (10) Once at Caritas we were given a big bag of sweets and were bringing it home to our neighbourhood in Črnomerec on a tram packed with people. A dressedup lady in our car said to her friend that the refugees are the ones crowding the trams because they’re always out riding around day and night. I looked at her and smiled because I knew we were displaced persons, the ones from Bosnia were the refugees. A bitter pun exposes a mechanism of internalizing a ‘refugee identity’ simultaneously with an acceptance of the discriminatory discourse (i.e. to be exiled implies still being from Croatia, while refugees are only people from Bosnia). The ‘us’ versus ‘them’ paradigm is easily adopted to one’s own disadvantage: “They found my accent weird, and when I said my mother had picked me out new dungarees, instead of jeans, at Caritas, I was branded a hick and a refugee.” (26)61 Also, the internalized social divide, which reifies the refugee identity allows the perception in which the dwellers of Zagreb are simply “better people”: “At first the people in Zagreb were better. They dressed better, they walked around on the wide streets and in the big squares, rode on the trams, without looking like they were doing anything special.” (10)62 The divide is intensified by the urban-rural ‘cultural clash’ which is a sufficient justification to claim the privilege among the “equally poor”: the (temporary) status of a refugee is perceived as less socially disadvantaged than having a rural background. The collective centre – hotel Zagorje – was located in the Croatian countryside, which is why the teenagers expelled from the town of Vukovar felt more sophisticated than the locals. Yet, the necessary ‘class division’ is executed among the refugees themselves: Znali smo da oni u barakama imaju jednu kupaonicu na njih dvadesetak, a barake su u prognaničkom životu bile dno dna. Vrhunac je bio Interconti. A mi smo negdje u sredini. (94)

61 62

“Njima je bilo smiješno moje otezanje, a kada sam rekla da mi je mama našla u Caritasu sasma nove farmerice umjesto trapke, donekle sam zaslužila naziv seljanke i izbjeglice.” “Ispočetka su Zagrepčani bili naprosto bolji ljudi. Bili su lepše obučeni, hodali su po širim ulicama i velikim trgovima, vozili su se u tramvaju i pritom izgledali kao da ne rade ništa uzbudljivo.”

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We knew there were twenty to a bathroom at the barracks, and the barracks were the bottom of the barrel in the life of displaced persons. At the other end of the spectrum was the Intercontinental Hotel in Zagreb. We were somewhere in between. An ironical recollection of the autofictional narrator in the following quotation is an expressive commentary on the end of Yugoslav official egalitarian politics. The new allegedly liberal discourse is presented from the perspective of the teenage war generation, effortlessly showing its discriminatory side and offering grounds for gathering in the just cultural war once the alleged innate differences are recognized: Ujedinli smo se u ratu protiv Pajceka, to je bio omiljeni nadimak za Zagorce, koji je počeo odmah. Bio je okrutan i dugotrajan, uz rijetka primirja i pokoje stvarno prijateljstvo. Svi smo bili manje-više istih godina, gotovo jednako siromašni, ali mi smo došli iz grada, pravog, s gradskim trgom, baroknim zgradama, gradskom kavanom i nobelovcem, a oni su imali samo slastičarnu kod Sulje i šugavog predsjednika komunjaru koji [je] sve ovo i zakuhao. Argumenti su bili neoborivi. Da ne spominjem one manje važne kao što su smrad po svinjama, blatnjave čizme do koljena, pijane učenike viših razreda i pokoju trudnu Pepicu. […] Takve Pajceke nismo ništa razumjeli, nama je njihov govor zvučao kao mješavina šiptarskog i slovenskog. Zvali smo ih socijalni slučajevi, mada smo svi skupa bili na platnoj listi države, samo što su oni to bili svojom voljom ili naprosto zato što su glupi i lijeni, a mi zbog Srba. (41) We joined forces in our war against the Piglets – our favourite nickname for the Zagorje locals – which began on our first day at school. The war was cruel and went on for ages, with the rare ceasefire and only sometimes real friendship. We were all about the same age, all equally poor, but our group had come from Vukovar, a city, a real urban center with a main square, baroque buildings, a café, and a Nobel Prize winner, while all they had was a pastry shop, Suljo’s, and their mangy commie president Tito who made this whole mess in the first place. Our main arguments were rock-solid. And besides, they reeked of pigs, their boots were caked with mud to the knees, the kids in the upper grades came to school drunk, and there were pregnant Miss Piggies. […] The backwoods Piglets spoke in a language we couldn’t understand, it sounded more like Albanian63 mixed with Slovenian. We called them basket cases. We and they received handouts, but they did so willingly, or were simply stupid and lazy, while we were stuck there because of the Serbs.

63

The translation doesn’t show the pejorative denotation of the language spoken by the Albanians in the original text.

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

The almost comically intoned comment at the end arises from the narrator’s notreflected repetition of arguments disseminated in fact by the political elites. Also, this perception of reality is the source of the narrator’s enduring ironical distance towards the circumstances she describes, being the premise of her ‘political incorrectness’. Unlike the nostalgic reflections about Yugoslavia, the one circulating among the teenagers in this novel is the mentioned political discourse, instantaneously introducing the new socio-economic and nation-building rhetoric: Yugoslavia is seen as economically backward and politically dogmatic by the protagonists, who approve of the nation state’s agenda allowing people to finally live a real life. Yugoslavia is not even seen as a disillusion, but a deception. Ironically, the protagonists’ own views about better alternatives reflect another ideologized reality. Cultural and societal shifts echo in the vocabulary of the teenage protagonists as an admiration for the western lifestyle and its commodified culture. The narrator got the opportunity to test the genuineness of the fantasy during the program for the refugee children which involved spending two weeks in a host family in Italy: once she realized her relatively well-off host family didn’t live in a luxurious villa with a swimming pool like in the series Beverly Hills (49), she experienced a kind of a culture shock. In hindsight conveyed as a self-orientalizing attitude, this admiration is reinforced by the completion and stability promised by a commodified life, unlike the unpredictability of the reality they live. Likewise, a game she and her brother played as children called Granica (Border) would start with the brother’s suggestive question about the country she wanted to represent – Germany or Yugoslavia – reminding her that Yugoslavia is her homeland and that partisans won against the Germans. Frankness of her choice lead to her defeat. The brother knowingly won the game owing to his economical predominance: his banknote was worth four of hers, as the mark was stronger than dinar (19). The brother otherwise teased her that their family lived an extravagant life before she was born, when they ran out of money and returned to the poor Yugoslavia (20). Neither memory of the illustrious antifascist struggle nor subjective affective attachment (as integral elements of Yugo-nostalgia) contest the failure of the Yugoslav project. Yugoslavia is a bad label: in Italy they address the protagonist “bambina jugoslava” (51), but she immediately corrects them, making a goof along the way: “Croatia, no Jugoslavija, bambina Croatia.” (52). She also makes more serious political statements: “Tuđman buono, Tito no” (53), revealing a precocious antiYugoslav sentiment. An encounter with the girl Maja from Belgrade is an expressive episode of this ‘children’s patriotism’. The narrator undeniably reports she couldn’t stand Maja who was on her side happy that they can speak “Yugoslav”. While the narrator insisted her language was Croatian, Maja answered back that it is all the same anyways, making this enactment of the language politics resolve in the narrator’s refusal to communicate (53–54).

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Some of the critics consider the ‘incorrect’ political attitudes of the narrator to be a controversial bias, while her standpoint could be seen as either a sign of a non-mediated testimony (focaliser is the girl), or as pointing up the girl’s anger and discontent. Many of her statements are a clear-cut political statement: “Like everything else in my life that happened for no reason at all. Okay, the Serbs did their bit, but the real reason, tell me, is what?” (126)64 Yet, references to Yugoslavia, often associated to Serbs and “commies”, are unambiguously employed to depict the deterioration of the living standards and the position of the narrator’s family. Her friends and she would visit Tito’s birthplace: “We girls wrote all kinds of things railing against the Serbs and Commies in the guest book [...]. I wrote: Comrade Tito, thanks a million, big of you to give the cute little room to my mother, brother, and me, rot in hell.” (89)65 In the ambiance of their new communal life in the hotel – represented as an alternative social organization – Yugoslavia is considered a redundant, almost laughable venture. On the other side, an anecdote with a centre’s chapel depicts absurdity of offhand new observances: one of the hotel’s conference halls is transformed into a chapel, after the residents removed Tito’s pictures and “the Party books”, locked them inside the big conference table and covered it with a white cloth. Though the new altar clearly marks the new symbolic order, it is also a metaphor of a denied connection with the previous historical period (31). By the end of the novel the grown-up narrator ironically comments the discrimination her family experienced. An absurdist picture as an effect of a little girl’s focalization transforms into a disillusioned awareness: “where they think of you as a lower life-form” (139)66 . Nevertheless, to be a refugee is later on internalized as the situation which involves new types of affiliation and feeling of belonging: – I ti imaš prognanički karton? – gleda me krupnih nasmiješenih očiju, djevojka nešto starija od mene, a ja se osjećam kao da mi se u stranoj zemlji obratio netko tko govori mojim jezikom. (116) [So you, too, have a displaced persons’” ID? Watching me with big, smiling eyes is a girl, a little older than me, and I feel as if I’m abroad and somebody who knows my language has spoken to me]; Volim ljude koji su prošli rat, odmah su mi simpatični (142) [I loved people who’d been through the war, right away they were more appealing].

64 65

66

“kao i sve druge stvari u mom životu koje su se dogodile bez ikakvog razloga. Dobro, Srbi su itekako pomogli, ali pravi razlog, recite mi, koji je?” “Čak smo se i mi cure znale svetiti Srbima i komunjarama, zapisujući razne stvari u knjigu dojmova [...]. Ja sam zapisala: Druže Tito, hvala ti na prekrasnoj maloj sobici koju si osigurao mami, bratu i meni, truni u paklu.” “kad te od samog početka smatraju nižom vrstom”.

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

Narrator moves back to Zagreb as she starts her secondary school and commences living in a dormitory. This prompts a new feeling of actual excitement about living away from home. This new dynamic partially makes the hotel feel like home, suggesting the concept of home as a place of return. A relational, rather than essential notion of home (like the identity), substantially alters its meaning, becoming a temporary residence: Neobično je vikendom vratiti se u hotel./ Gotovo da imam osjećaj kao da se vraćam kući. [...] Mama je gore u sobi, spremna čeka da opere dvije torbe veša na ruke, ujutro dolazi i brat. [...] Možda je netko i zaboravio da su nas smjestili ovdje i ko zna koliko će još ovakav život nesmetano teći. Lijepo je biti kući. (123)

It was so strange, on the weekends, coming back to the hotel. I felt like I was coming home, almost. […] Mama was up in our room, waiting to launder two bags of dirty clothes by hand, my brother would get in tomorrow morning. […] Maybe somebody has forgotten about us here and who knows how much longer this life will flow along, unchecked. It was nice being home.

Nevertheless, memories of the hotel are not romanticized. Echoing the reality of war, the hotel as a new home has been the space in which frightening and odd phenomena merged with the narrator’s enjoyable experiences of the coming of age.

III 3.2.

Lures and Fears of Coming of Age

The collective centre involves living in a type of an extended family: hotel’s community embodies a peculiar social, but also psychological ambiance of the narrator’s coming of age, modifying her notions of family relationships and roles. The lack of private space makes other people’s routines and activities public, and so the very conception of the private changes as the space in which almost all is shared and open. Yet, this also affects the parameters of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, qualifying one of the initial narrator’s comments, an almost relieved conclusion about her grandpa who was “just crazy, nothing worse” (33). While madness is apparently normalized, the eccentricity of the hotel’s community produces peculiar bonds of solidarity, and forms a common identity which is hostile and intolerant onwards, to the local people. The ‘hotel’s family’ is an assemblage of bizarre characters. One of them is the narrator’s mother, who on the surface seems to be one of the few remaining ‘normals’, but her character changes and in a way adapts to the ambiance and the collective consciousness of the hotel community. The mother is described as a ghost, present but distant, sleepless and speechless. The occasion of the grandfather’s funeral only highlights her usual temper: “Mama was dark, as dark as she

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could be.” (87) 67 The mother regretfully remembers her life she thought of back in the past as hard, with a ‘double burden’ of working in the factory and a household work, cynically concluding that now she can sleep as long as she likes, since there is nothing but “the flies and waiting” (59). Unlike the mother’s bitter regret for the unfair, but ‘normal’ life, the neighbour in a hotel celebrates her new life, as the effect of the same circumstances, activating again the narrator’s ‘politically incorrect’ speech: Neki drugi su je mrzili jer je bila sretna i jer je došlo njezino vrijeme. Prije ju je muž tukao, bili su siromašni i živjeli u nekoj straćari bez kupaonice, a onda je on poginuo. Ona je dobila penziju i kupila kazetofon pa je pjevala iz sveg glasa uz otvorena vrata. (29) Some hated her because she was happy and because her time had come and she was still young enough to enjoy it. Her husband had beat her, they were poor and lived in a shack with no plumbing, and then he was killed. She was given his pension and bought a cassette player and sang at the top of her lungs by the open door. A gallery of awkward, often intimidating portrayals of people and events represents a fitting setting of the narrator’s fears and discomfort about growing up and discovering the reality beyond that of childhood. Bizarre events, as a rule involving an uncanny humour, are narrativized with the motifs of death in the background. Grandmothers of the hotel are the object of mockery and loathing by the hotel’s children, as an unexpected and provocative contrast to an acceptable social courtesy. Though the narrator describes these women as insane and scary chthonic creatures, they are related to the fears of growing up, and in particular the bodily changes that occur. Sexualisation of the body and the development of sexual desire are narrativized in the episode about the encounter with a “crazy grandma” who sings a quirky lascivious song to children she comes upon in the hotel’s foyer: [B]aba Milica koja je imala šećer i bila malo luda, a kad god bi prolazila pored nas, zastala bi, nalaktila se i zapjevala: – Ide mala šokica, vidi joj se kokica, deda kaže pokrij je, baba kaže jebi je. – Onda bi se počela smijati i otišla svojim putem. (39) [O]ld lady Milica who had diabetes and was a little quirky, and every time she would walked by us she’d stop, lean on her elbows, and sing: “A cute young thing goes strolling by, her little chick is open wide, Granddad says tuck it, Grandma says fuck it.” Then she’d cackle and walk on. 67

“Mama je bila mračna, mračna je bila i inače.” The translation is imprecise; in the original it reads: “Mama was dark, dark was she always”.

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

Liminal mind and body of the narrator on the threshold of her womanhood are easily attracted to sexualized topics and their discussion, expressing an aversion and curiosity simultaneously. Another hotel’s family is depicted as “not normal”: “[S]he was a slut and the kid was a crook. Somehow it got out that Mika’s little sister pubic hair started growing while she was still in third grade. They were all creepy.” (89)68 It is creepy (“not normal” in the original) to have pubic hair already, which is an obvious sign of the narrator’s feeling of unease and a reason to penalize the other girl. Lascivious content and speech indicate sexual desires and aggression which is socially acceptable, while the libido is still dormant. Yet, alongside this latency stage marking the onset of puberty, some aspects of infantile sexuality infuse the narrator’s behaviour. It is narratologicaly discernible as a mask of a little girl the narrator’s instinctively puts on when a feeling or an experience are overwhelming. Sexualisation at moments also triggers a feeling of guilt, while the text organizes as a semiotic discourse, communicating instinctual drives, as possible emblems of a type of regression. However, the intrusion of the child’s psyche expresses also traumatizing tragic family history and the disturbing ambiance the narrator lives in. An episode with an accidental killing of a bunny indicates a sadistic behaviour as the “transformation of the death instinct into an aggressive instinct, an instance whose manifest erotic component is explained in the fusion of the sexual instinct with this aggressive instinct” (Deigh 1991: 307). The episode develops as the narrator pays a visit to her classmate who “was living in a tiny house on a hill with countless snotty brothers and sisters who were all small and grimy” (43)69 and who wants to show the newly born pet bunnies. The narrator remembered how her grandfather used to carry a rabbit by its ears, and thinking it is the right way to do it, she instantly killed the little animal: “something went crunch […] I set it down fast but the little snout wasn’t wiggling any more” (43–44)70 . Yet, an unintended cruelty suggest her loss of control in face of repulsion she actually feels for the classmate and her family who are described as a bunch of rabbits, dirty and nonhuman. Appearing also as the narrator’s exteriorized fears, little children in the hotel are seen as monstrous creatures, ghosts of the place who dwell in the ambivalent space of the collective accommodation centre. Around nine in the evening nobody is around in the hotel except few creepy old women and little hotel ogres: [N]ešto djece, male raspuštene hotelske djece koja su se rodila ovdje i sve što su znala bilo je visjeti po hotelskim hodnicima, verati se po ogradama i zavlačiti po svim rupama Političke. Oni su bili gotovo neprimjetni, ali kao neka viša svijest 68 69 70

“bila je kurva, a mali lopov. Nekako se tada otkrilo i da su Mikinoj mlađoj sestri dlake dolje izrasle još u trećem razredu. Svi su bili nenormalni”. “Živjela je u minijaturnoj kući na brdu s nebrojenom braćom i sestrama koji su svi bili mali i musavi.” “Nešto je krcnulo. […] Naglo sam ga spustila, ali njuškica više nije radila.”

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ovoga prostora, prilagodljivi mali žohari koji od pelena znaju kako će ući u svaki kabinet. U jednom su se krstili, u drugom išli u vrtić, a nije isključeno da će u trećem popušiti prvu cigaretu. (95–96) a kid here and there, the untended rug rats who were born here and knew only about scampering around the hotel halls, shinnying up the railings, and crawling in and out of all the Political School nooks and crannies. They were like no-seeums, yet they served as the higher consciousness of our living space, well-adapted little cockroaches who knew their way around every conference room when they were still in diapers: baptized in one, at day care in the second, smoking their first cigarette in the third. Her feeling of aversion towards children as ‘adaptable insects’ “may represent a direct projection of one’s own drives, as the tiny creatures may represent genitals, feces, or little children” (Doctor and Kahn 2008: 113). This fear is correlated to her fear of dirt (the previous perception of the classmate’s family and house) and reappears in the narrator’s report on the bugs that invaded their hotel’s room. A comparison between children and bugs becomes apparent, underscoring her disgust and anxiety: Svaki put kad bih ušla i upalila svjetlo, crnilo bi se rasipalo preko ruba lavaboa, u odvod, u svim smjerovima po tuš kadi. U sekundi bi nestali, mogao si samo dokačiti jednog ili dva [...]. U početku bih noću vrisnula, taj prizor bi me prestravio, gadili su nam se […], a onda kasnije, kao i uvijek, dogodio se suživot. (109–110) Each time I came in and turned on the light in our bathroom at the hotel, blackness scuttled over the sink edge, into the plumbing, every which way around the shower stall. In a second they’d vanish, I could only nab one or two […]. At first I shrieked at night, the sight of them terrified me, they revolted us so much […], but then, as always, coexistence took over. Obviously, the big refugee family coexists with these frightening phenomena. The emerging sexuality and the narrator’s coming of age appear as perfect contrast to a desolate everyday life and a mournful family situation. Though it is a way out of the whole desperate situation, her falling in love with a local boy bares signs of bitterness, as though she started having new feelings out of spite: “[O]n Granddad’s bed Nana was sighing audibly, Granddad was six feet under, and despite it all, or maybe because of it, I felt so alive: I needed to come up with a plan.” (88)71 A new 71

“na dedinom krevetu baka je glasno uzdisala, deda je ležao u zemlji, a usprkos svemu tome, ili baš zbog svega toga, ja sam se osjećala tako živom: za tjedan dana trebalo je napraviti plan” (88).

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

feeling presents a possibility of change, a bustle that stands in a sharp contrast to the daily routine in the centre made of waiting. Nevertheless, though obviously desiring to bypass the reality, she is on the other side aware that this asymmetrical sections of life have to be somehow integrated, which is presumably a sign of her growing up. One evening the boy walks with her home, and while answering his questions about her family she suddenly utters: “My old man’s missing […]. I hadn’t told him that before, it hadn’t fit in anywhere.” (109)72 . Nostalgic recollections of the better past are also rare. Besides the past present when watching their family photos, on one occasion the narrator remembers ‘her future in the past’, her childhood dreams about the future she imagined to be the place in which she would be just like her mom: U kratkoj žutoj frotirnoj haljini na tregere odlazit ću na kavu kod komšinice, a onda ćemo pričati dugo u noć; jesi ti čula što se dogodilo, jesi ti čula da je nju muž ostavio, jesi ti čula da je njoj umrla sestra, jesi ti čula da je dobio otkaz i sve tako dobre i normalne stvari. (111) In my short yellow terry-cloth dress with spaghetti straps I’ll go for coffee at the neighbour’s and then we’ll talk the night away; have you heard what happened, can you believe her husband left her, have you heard her sister died, have you heard he was fired, and all those fine and ordinary things. The same way her mother feels nostalgic about the bygone days despite actually having had a hard life, the narrator imagines even those sad and disadvantageous life events to be simple proofs of a normal life. This reversed optics enabled by the child’s perspective is the most illustrative figure of the usurped everyday life. Yet, besides the identification, the coming of age story necessitates the emancipation from the parental figures. Since this separation has to take place in the moment the narrator is already separated from one parent (the missing father), while the mother is barely functional, it becomes a fairly ambivalent process. The crisis preceding the coming of age is in this narrative forced from the outside, the psychological development has been interrupted by the external reality which appears as the main agent of the changes the protagonist would normally go through. The violent death of the narrator’s father in the mass execution of prisoners of war by the Serbian military in 1991 is the autobiographical inscription inside the coming of age crisis.

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“ – Stari mi je nestao [...]. Nisam mu to dosad ni rekla, nije se nigdje uklapalo.”

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III 3.3.

An Absent Witness to the Father’s Death

The novel opens with the scene in which the narrator as a little girl talks to her father about a Serbian nationalist song she had sung apparently not knowing neither the meaning nor the effect it had on her father. While the scene reveals the nature of their father-daughter relationship, it also sheds light on the father’s unapologetic ethical and political principles. A fine nostalgic humour cuts across the episode disclosing a delicate pre-war time and the immediate identification of the father inside the whole nationalist ambiance: Ne sjećam se ničega. Samo neki bljeskovi. Otvoreni prozori u stanu, gusto ljetno poslijepodne, pomahnitale žabe s Vuke. Provlačim se između dvije fotelje i pjevušim: - Ko to kaže ko to laže Srbija je mala. – Tata zatvara novine i okreće se prema meni, osjećam njegovu nervozu. – Šta to pjevaš? – pita me. – Pa ništa, čula sam od Bore i Danijela. – Da te više nikad nisam čuo, j l’ ti jasno? – Dobro, ćale. – Ja sam ti tata, a ne ćale, pička mu materina! (5) I don’t remember much of how it all began. I remember flashes: windows flung wide in our appartement, a stuffy summer afternoon, manic frogs from the Vuka. I wriggle between two armchairs and hum – Whoever claims Serbia is small is lying – Papa folds the paper and turns to me, I feel his irritation. “What is that that you’re singing?” he asks. “Oh, nothing, a song from Bora and Danijel73 .” “Well stop it!” “You bet, ćale.” “Don’t call me ćale, I’m your papa, and damn him to hell!” The opening remark about remembering nothing draws on the literary institute of an unreliable narrator to communicate the actual unreliability and doubtfulness of memory, that is, of remembering the past. Nevertheless, this paradoxical declaration suggests also a regret for the times that passed without her really managing to fix them well enough in her memory. Instead of a ‘solid’, ‘real’ material of the past there are just “flashes”. Yet, the impossibility of remembering points also at the traumatic experience. The flashbacks are as a rule the mode of appearance of the father’s narrative. While other events are chronologically and gradually composed, the father’s episodes turn up suddenly, interrupting the fable. They have no actual connection to the main story – except the narrator herself – demonstrating as well the uncertainty of the father’s condition textually. The father was captured as a prisoner of war and was not seen again, leaving open the question of whether he is alive. Lack of information intertwines with the fear of knowing the truth, resulting in various confusing hints that keep up the hopes of the family that the father is still alive. 73

She actually sings a song she heard from Bora and Danijel, presumably schoolmates of Serbian origin.

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

In this opening fragment the father is characterized by his simple and immediate reaction to (Serbian) nationalism, which is explicitly forbidden. Importantly, however, his attitude does not convey a liberal worldview disavowing nationalism in general, or warning against the emerging nationalisms in Yugoslavia of the time. The father is a Croatian patriot who would become a soldier in the war: “He loved people, but he loved Croatia, too” (133).74 A similar attitude is possibly expressed by the ban to address him colloquially “ćale” (“pa”), as the title is present predominantly in Serbian slang.75 The father sees his decision to fight in the war as his patriotic pledge standing above the family commitment: while he also perceives it as his paternal duty (115) the mother shows no understanding for this ‘code of honour’: “And in the end, she cursed my father for not leaving Vukovar with us. That didn’t sound fair to me.” (67)76 Yet, a ‘male authority’ of the honourable compatriot and a strict father in reality retreat in front of his loving gesture. He appears to be even a pretended authority, as the actual focus of this miniature memory is his self-identification as her “dad” – “I am your dad”. Opting out the rigidity the assumed father’s authority is based on, a hypocorism “dad” is the most simple and substantial expression of their father-daughter relationship. The subsequent scene involving the father is the family’s flight from Vukovar, which is actually the moment they separate from the father for good, but think they are leaving for summer vacation. Parents are walking with their children to the bus station: “Papa’s carrying me, even though I’m big, he carries me the whole way. He’s wearing white pants and a blue T-shirt. We pull apart and kiss, first we make silly faces and then we air-kiss. It’s our thing.” (6)77 A warm and intense physical contact communicates the father-daughter relationship in a nutshell. The narrator says: “it is how we do it”, referring to the distinctive gesture embodying the uniqueness of their bond. The father and the relationship to him are profoundly bodily, making a sharp contrast to the successive communication which would at first occur from a distance, and gradually decrease. Occasional phone calls or letters in the beginning are replaced by the second-hand information from someone who was in contact with him, ending with the untrustworthy rumours or even positive oracle answers. In the sphere of superstition, the father is consistently present,

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“Volio je ljude, ali volio je i Hrvatsku”. Besides in Dalmatia, this is a rarely used expression in Croatia. In Vukovar, however, the vocabulary had been more diversified and was common hearing typically Serbian expressions due to the mixed population and proximity of the Serbian border. “A na kraju, u takvim situacijama, uvijek bi opsovala mog tatu, što nije izašao iz grada s nama. Meni to nije izgledalo fer, tada.” “Tata me nosi iako sam velika, nosi me cijelim putem. Ima bijele hlače i plavu majicu. Rastajemo se i ljubimo u usta, onako da se prvo malo iskreveljimo, a onda kobajage poljubimo. To je nešto naše.”

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which in effect constitutes his ambivalent status. This absence, though, has been dramatically felt in the episode describing the visit of their paternal uncle: Bio je visok, preplanuo, lijep gotovo kao tata. – Zdravo, zdravo! – punio je sobu ugodni muški glas. Muškarac, ne dječak, onaj kojeg nema78 , koji nam je nestao, kojeg čekamo i tražimo, samo ne baš on, ali skoro, njegova krv, njegov brat. (99) He was tall, tanned, nearly as handsome as papa. “Hello, hello!” he filled the room with his congenial baritone. A man, not the one who’d gone missing, who’d disappeared, the one we were waiting and searching for, not quite, almost, his blood, his brother. The father as the protagonist is integrated in the narrative as an unverified information, representing a problematic knowledge about his own survival. Initial mention of the unverified information is in the form of a newspapers article: Tragedija obitelji s dvoje djece počela je padom Vukovara, od kada ne znaju za oca. Ostao je braniti grad sve do ulaska četnika i jugovojske, a potom mu se izgubio trag. Nema ga na popisu ranjenih i poginulih, nema ga u evidenciji Međunarodnog Crvenog križa koji je obišao srpske logore… Ostaje jedino nada da je otac možda živ u nekom od divljih logora po Srbiji nedosupnih i za Međunarodni Crveni križ (16). The tragedy of this family with two children began with the fall of Vukovar. They’ve heard nothing ever since from their father. He stayed on to defend the city until the Chetniks and Yugo Army marched in, and then all trace of him vanished. He is not on the list of wounded or killed, he is not in the register of the International Red Cross who made the rounds of all the Serbian camps… The only hope left is that their father may be alive in one of the improvised camps in Serbia, out of bounds for the International Red Cross. The unavailability of the facts is substituted by a superstitious predicting: Visak je uvijek govorio da je živ, da nije pod zemljom i da je dobrog zdravlja. Tetka je mami dala brojeve telefona od nekoliko vidovnjaka i numerologa koji su rekli isto što i teta Ninin visak. Jedino je neki čovjek, koji se vratio u razmjeni, rekao mami da je mog tatu pokrio plahtom po glavi (17). The pendulum always said he’s alive, he’s not in the ground, and he’s healthy. Auntie gave Mama phone numbers of seers and numerologists who said the same. Just one man, who came out through a prisoner exchange, told Mama he’d covered my father with the sheet. The information about the father’s death turns up in the middle of the optimistic oracles, suddenly interrupting them, but not being clearly distinct from them, as 78

Italics added for emphasis. The translation should be: ”the one who’d gone missing”.

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

an effect of the levelling perspective of the girl narrator: the expression “to cover with the sheet” appears as a part of an awkward magic ritual. The father’s death lingers in the realm of those oracle visions. Nevertheless, by becoming more definite as his capture and the subsequent murder have been confirmed, his absence is substituted by his presence. This paradox of his more felt presence owes also to the fact that the father’s death is revealed as a document. A letter which the narrator’s brother writes to the Direction for social care contains officially authorized information: “My father was taken prisoner on November 20, 1991, at the Vukovar hospital by Major Veselin Šljivančanin and the Yugoslav People’s Army.” (81)79 Death is the autobiographical inscription. The one and only time the father is present in the story after their separation is the extensive fragment in detail describing the father’s murder, as if the narrator was present as the witness, the one she becomes by making an oath that she would imagine the moment of his death until the end of her life. (136) The father’s murder is reproduced inside the episode in which for the first time the narrator’s coming of age and the absence of the father are expressively associated. Supressed fears and agonising images abruptly appear after she – unintentionally – confronts the trauma: “To remember and narrate trauma means, then, to attempt to write in and through wounds, through the holes within memory that represent the incursion of the past into the present. Yet how does one ‘write (through) wounds’?” (Eades 2017: 185). Happening in the moment which seemingly couldn’t be more apart from her troubling everyday life, the episode takes place at the party after she gets drunk disappointed in her favourite who ignored her and passed by without greeting her. She goes out of the club with the help of her friend Marina whose dad soon arrives to pick them up. As Marina’s father approaches she feels ashamed, but soon also relieved since he comforts her saying all would be fine after they simply have some coffee. She feels weak, not only due to her condition but obviously moved by his gesture. She almost faints before Marina’s father takes her into his arms: Gotovo me dignuo, bio je jak, glava mi je počivala na njegovom ramenu. Ja sam tako mala, znam samo tepati i držat se za tatinu ruku. [...] Plačem jer me drži tata. Tata. – Tatice, tatice, šta si mi donio? (128) He almost lifted me up, he was strong, my head slumped onto his shoulder. I am such a little girl, all I know is how to prattle and clutch Papa’s hand. […] I’m crying because it’s my father holding me. Papa. “Papa, papa, what did you bring me?” The ‘staging’ of the father-daughter relationship prompts childhood memories of her father coming back from work and giving her some coins to buy the ice-cream. 79

“Moj je otac zarobljen 20.11.1991. u vukovarskoj bolnici od strane majora Veselina Šljivančanina i vojske JNA.”

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This flashback successively transforms into a reminiscence in which her father plays with her and her friends until one of them tells her dad is great.80 A replication of the father-daughter relationship commands the spreading out of the father’s images from the past. While she is aware that it is Marina’s father who drives them home, the childhood past unstoppably breaks in. Chronotopic childhood images (she washes the car with her dad, they eat water melon in the yard, go to the beach), funny anecdotes (when her father set the wrong alarm time and they got up too early for school), events portraying her father’s care and love (once she took a pill thinking it is a candy and ended up in the hospital) form a whole catalogue of memories. A record ends in an episode of taking a family photo: Aparat škljocne, a ja zauvijek ostanem ispred njega, s njegovom rukom koja me štiti i gledam drsko u ženu iza polaroida, meni nitko ništa ne može. Fotografija je ubrzo gotova i onda se seli na stolić u hodniku pokraj telefona, a kasnije dobiva i okvir. Tamo ostaje sve do trenutka u kojem jedan četnik ulazi u kuću nakon što je zaklao dedu i kaže: – Oću da mi nađete i ostale s ove slike. Ima da svi završe kao deda. (133) The camera clicked and there I am standing forever next to him, his hand shielding me, and me staring boldly at the woman behind the Polaroid, no one can touch me. The photograph was quickly ready and it moved to the front-hall table by the phone, and later it was put in a frame. There it stood until the moment when a Chetnik came into the house after hi slit Grandpa’s throat and said: “Hunt me down the others in this picture. All of them will end up like granddad here.” Two separate temporal sequences – the moment the photo was taken, and the moment the Serbian paramilitary looks at it – are integrated through the family photo. The time ellipsis signals that the only place some of them are still alive, and are still together is the past captured in the family photo. The flash of the camera is the flashback in the narrator’s memory, and repeats immediately after the family photo fragment to convey another picture as an act of watching the event as a direct witness. As if being the one who photographs, the narrator is capturing the very moment of the father’s murder. She is the one authenticating the moment of death: Sada se sve zamrači. Obično ne idem tamo. Dođem do ruba provalije, osjetim zadah smrti, stojim minutu dvije, a onda pobjegnem nazad. Večeras ću to napraviti, doći ću tamo i ući, pa neka me više ne bude. Dok se približavam već čujem riječi: – Lezite dole, lezite dole!! Jebem vam majku ustašku! – On je negdje u sredini, glava mu je u blatu. (133)

80

“Ti imaš tak super tatu!” (“You have such a super dad!”; 128)

3 Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine

Now everything goes dark. I don’t usually go there. I come to the brink, sniff the reek of death, stand for a minute or two, and run back. Tonight I’ll do it, I’ll go there, and walk straight in, and let it be the end of me. As I move closer I can already hear the words: “Lie down! Lie down!! Motherfucking Ustasha!” He’s somewhere in the middle, his face is in the mud. A horrifying, realistic account of the capture and torture of the prisoners in the camp Ovčara follows, until they all are murdered, including her father. Her only comfort is the thought of him being murdered before long, in the beginning. By making an oath that she would keep on trying to imagine this scene until the end of her life, she returns to reality by opening the door to their hotel room. She is back home after a drunk night out, and after the dreadful encounter with her father in the moment of his death. On one occasion later in the secondary school the protagonist comforts a classmate whose father also died by saying that “it gets easier” (159). What the friend didn’t hear is the narrator’s follow-up comment that saying something like that is simply “the worst lie of all” (ibid.). The acknowledgment that the feeling of loss is permanent is set in opposition to a fixed image of her and her father ‘forever’ next to each other on the family photo. In the concluding chapter, when one of the two wishes comes true and her mother, brother and her are about to move in into their own, fresh new flat, it appears that she can finally break off into the new life: “The girl who used to live in a dorm […] couldn’t wipe the grin from her face, couldn’t wait for today to be over. Tomorrow began our new life. I’d believe it when I saw it.” (154)81 They arrange everything, so it looks like a ‘real home’: Krevete smo odabrali, odabrali smo i kuhinju, trpezarijski stol, šest stolica i kutnu garnituru. Odabrali smo i sliku mrtve prirode. Sve na jednom mjestu. Na njoj je kriška lubenice i nekoliko jabuka, lijepa je i naivna, svijetlih tonova. Takve slike ljudi imaju u domovima. (159). We chose the beds, we chose the kitchen cabinets, the dining-room table, six chairs, a sectional sofa. We even chose a still-life painting. All at one store. On it is a slice of watermelon and a few apples, it’s pretty and simple, pastels. These are the kinds of paintings people have in their homes. Yet, the narrator feels estranged. The expected resolution of problems is replaced by her realization that the crisis is permanent. The anxiety is restored as the fear of death of her mother and brother, simultaneous with the hope her father might be

81

“Bivša cura iz doma [...] ne može skinuti osmjeh s lica, ne može dočekati da prođe današnji dan. Sutra počinje novi život. Kad vidim, vjerovat ću.”

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still alive (“Možda je tata još živ”; 162). The father’s absence permeates the space of home, suggesting that the home – though tangible and validated ‘as the home’ – is unattainable. The autobiographical inscription revokes the possibility of the (happy) ending, leaving the question of coping with the tragedy of war and its consequences open. Ivana Bodrožić’s story – just as Tanja Stupar Trifunović’s and Tea Tulić’s – is impossible without an inside-out view of the narrator who needed to go back to those hidden and forgotten spaces of immediate experiences, which Kristeva theorized as a ‘nonexpressive totality’, the state of the pre-symbolic language. Either by restaging this state in a space of the semiotic in which the sensual language of mother and child makes possible the writing in the first place, or by going through the profoundly traumatic event of death as a corporeal encounter, in these works the body that lived through these experiences has been written.82 In this way, the lived experiences have been paradoxically embodied by the narrated texts, while remaining locked inside the privileged discourse of the ‘nonexpressive’.

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“All that exists is your body, and the text over against it. The text is being written on your skin, it writes you! There is nothing behind the text? Or there is, but it is an abyss.“ (Tišma 2014: 231)

IV The Other Writing: Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction Pišem iz potrebe za pravdom. Da bih stvorila onoga kome nije bilo dato da se rodi, ili da bih produžila život onima kojima je bio pre vremena uzet. (Judita Šalgo)1   lines are cut, but distant friends live beyond their severed ends. (Luka Bekavac)2

Writing the war and ‘writing the body’ in a particular way materialize in the works of fiction by Snežana Andrejević and Luka Bekavac, two very distant authors of the post-Yugoslav literary field, who are at first glance very difficult to link together or compare. Yet, the topics and literary techniques employed in narrativizing the war as experience not communicable outside the “problem of gender differences” (Lukić 2003: 67) is what not only enables, but in a way dictates the comparison. This refers both to the possibility of supporting theoretic presumptions about the post-Yugoslav literature and seeing its ambiguities, that could be summed up as the reoccurring situation of privileging the male authorship. Snežana Andrejević’s novel Životu je najteže (Life’s Fatigue, 2007) was written in the midst of Yugoslav war, in a context which still could have been defined as Yugoslav, while Luka Bekavac writes his novels Drenje (2011) and Viljevo (2013) more than 20 years later, long after the war had ended, in the altered political and cultural contexts. Yet, their texts – and in particular Životu je najteže and Viljevo – com-

1 2

I write out of need for justice. To create someone who was not meant to be born, or to continue the lives of those whose lives were taken away before their time. (Šalgo 1987: 20) Bekavac 2013: 311; henceforth: Viljevo. The verse is the paraphrase of Louis MacNeice’s poem Epilogue: “All the wires are cut, my friends/ Live beyond the severed ends”, a fact mentioned by the narrator himself in a footnote.

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municate with each other in many ways and share a literary identity, owing to the themes of war and remembering, but also their feminist projections.3 Nevertheless, while Andrejević’s novel is not well-known, and the author herself is not part of the literary scene, Bekavac is a critically acclaimed author and prominent literary scholar, among other prizes, the winner of the European Prize for Literature in 2015. Hence, the effects of the contrastive analysis should show those blind spots in the reception and the overall literary discourse in which the two comparable writings and their authors have two parallel literary lives. The works by Andrejević and Bekavac tackle the possibility of writing about the war, and more generally of remembering – as the past always means the dead4 – as part of what Habermas theorizes as the atonement: “the dead have a claim on the living and the living have to do justice to the dead by atonement through memory and the development of a specific consciousness of atonement” (Habermas in Müller 2000: 96). The question of responsibility is central in the works of the two authors, and it emerges as the possibility to introduce the other inside the literary text. To ‘write the other’ in these fictions means to let the absent speak: subjects of this speech are the dead – “those who will never tell” – but also the ‘impossible writing other’, always implying the trouble with the female author(ship). In this sense, the narrators, or ‘speaking subjects’, are at the same time sex-marked, and appearing as ambiguous or even absent. The principle of these writings is to try “to see that dark thing, that other”,5 who is presumably not only the one left behind the temporal (and geographic) borders, but also the writer’s (invisible) other. The reading of correspondences opens with the analysis of Andrejević’s novel Životu je najteže, continues with the attempt of interpreting the conceptualisation of time and space in Bekavac’s fiction and their link to the above-mentioned critical themes, to be concluded with the reading of Bekavac’s second novel Viljevo against the fictional reality of Životu je najteže. Whereas in Andrejević’s novel the unstable narrating situation develops as an effect of the narrator’s ambiguous gender-fluctuating body, in Viljevo the narrator’s body is disjointed from the narration: there is no body – or “nonbody” (Punday 2003) – producing the text. There is only a text whose author cannot be detected with any certainty.

3

4

5

I already compared some aspect of the novels Životu je najteže and Viljevo in my 2018 article: “Reconstructing the Narrator in the Post-Yugoslav Fiction: On How to Tell a Storyteller in Snežana Andrejević’s Životu je najteže and Luka Bekavac’s Viljevo”. Quoting Elie Wiesel Obrad Savić writes: “those who have not lived through the experience will never know; those who have will never tell; not really, not completely. [...] The past belongs to the dead.” (In Savić 2006: 72). “Prvi put, pisao sam sporo, s velikim prekidima, pokušavajući da vidim ono crno, onog drugog.” (The first time, I wrote slowly, with interruptions, trying to see that dark thing, that other. Andrejević 2007: 95)

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

IV 1.

Snežana Andrejević’s Životu je najteže: A ‘Two-faced’ Narrator Moj život je u ono malo olova. Njemu je najteže. 6   To sam bio Ja. Pisac koga nikad niko nije video.7 (Snežana Andrejević)

Though being a rare piece about the Yugoslav wars and the period of nineties, written at the outbreak of war, Snežana Andrejević’s (b. 1956 in Kladovo) novel Životu je najteže remained on the fringes of the literary scene in Serbia. It appears that not only her novel, but the author herself persists in being anonymous, publicizing only a few biographical details that are scattered in several anthologies or on the cover of her only novel. While the status of the book can be easily correlated to the tabooed topic of war it narrativizes, which is why the critic Miloš Živanović – in the only available review of the novel – defined the novel as the “unpleasant signal to those who did not want to see it” (Živanović 2007: III), part of it has to do with the already discussed relationship between the genre of war literature and the (expected or desired) gender of the author. Moreover, the whole ‘history’ of Andrejević’s absence from the scene, together with almost no relevant analysis or a debate about her novel is driven by the more general position of women authors. Nevertheless, the situation also suggests a possibly deliberate ‘staging’ of the whole gender ‘status quo’ by the author herself. Her ‘authorial persona’ virtually barely exists, a photograph is impossible to find, only ‘hard data’ are the place and the date of birth, and a bibliography of her radio plays, various short forms, literature for adolescents, and the suggestive information that she writes under various pseudonyms (Kovačević 2004: 252).8 Besides the general information about having published more than two thousand minidramas, children stories and texts treating adolescents and trauma topics, the author with certainty published a prose-poetic experiment Ja sam đubre (I Am Trash, 1988), the novel Životu je najteže, originally written as an epic poem

6 7 8

My life is in that bit of lead. Life is very heavy. (Andrejević 2007: 20) It was Me. The writer nobody has ever seen. (Ibid.: 104; henceforth: Life) The suspicion about the ‘conspiracy’ has been further supported after an unsuccessful attempt to find the whole text of the unproven David Albahari’s blurb review of the novel. The search was concluded in the correspondence with the publisher who claimed to be unauthorized for the matter (of the ‘excerpt’ published on their own publication) and redirected me to search elsewhere. Also, while possibly taking part in the author’s ‘performance’, the comportment could be as well a part of the publisher’s strategy to promote the book, by ironically imitating the bombastic literary advertisement in the get-up of the book (the book also had an advert wrapper about the novel being the best piece on the Yugoslav wars so far).

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“about the dissolution of former Yugoslavia” (book cover) in the period 1990–1994 and first published as an abridged version in 2002, and the play Dva puta dva je pet (Two Times Two Is Five, 2004), awarded by the Serbian Association of Playwrights. The fact of auctorial nonappearance is integrated in the writing of the novel Životu je najteže, structured precisely on the changeability of the narrator’s status. Yet, the writing happens as the (re-)appearance of a double impossible presence: the absent female narrator puts on the mask of the dead, making the initial ‘gynocritical’ problem the problem of writing about the dead. The hybrid, ‘flowing’ textuality of the novel – integrating poetry, essayistic fragments and fiction – marks the possibilities of ‘writing the body’ beyond the écriture féminine matrix. The novel depicts the beginning of war, and more generally the social and political ambiance in Serbia in the beginning of nineties, making explicit references to the protests, repression, poverty and criminalization of the society, but also the most prominent political figures of the time, Tuđman and Milošević. The general feeling of claustrophobia and helplessness is at the beginning depicted over the narrator’s comment about the prison ambiance as salutary: “As if I’m not in jail, I feel free.” (Life: 9)9 Volatility of narration is a structural element of the novel’s experimental and fragmented text whose effect is the cyclical structure of the fable. This enables a possibility of reading the story “in many directions” (Živanović 2007: III). Linear reading follows the narrator from his stay in prison as a political prisoner, over his subsequent forced recruitment to the Vukovar front, until his return home after he had been wounded. This possibility competes with a ‘second-hand’ or even inverse version of the story told, reconstructed by following the clues spread through the story. The novel is divided into three chapters which seemingly coincide with the three chronological phases. Roughly, the first one, Životu je najteže (Life’s Fatigue), is devoted to the narrator’s stay in jail as a political prisoner right before the political turn that led to war. The second one Ispod Vukovara (Under Vukovar) is narrated from the perspective of a man – presumably the same one – who was forcefully drafted to the Vukovar front in Croatia, reporting first-hand about the everyday life of soldiers inside the infamous ‘war toponym’ of Vukovar.10 The ‘mimesis of war’ is a story within a story in the hospital, to which the narrator apparently had been admitted as the wounded. There he recollects his recent experience from the front. Yet, while it begins in the hospital, the second part continues as the account on his attempts to reintegrate into everyday life, while the war is, apparently, still on, together with the demonstrations against the regime, general insecurity and

9 10

“Kao da nisam u zatvoru, osećam se slobodno.” The title of the chapter possibly summons the traumatic war history of the town, being the allusion to the phrase “pad Vukovara” (the fall of Vukovar).

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

poverty that are described. The last part Carassius auratus11 , seemingly continuing the fable from the first part that was interrupted by the war sequence, conveys the period after the narrator’s return from the front and his dwelling in his girlfriend Vida’s attic, struggling to write. As he desires to make a name on the literary scene, this last part is awash with the commentaries about the literary scene of the time, from his preoccupation with the influential literary circles, allusions to leading authorial figures and literary prizes, to the publishing business. Nevertheless, the whole ambiance exposes the masculinist, often also misogynist, conservative if not nationalistic prerogatives of the cultural, and more closely, literary scene of the time. In this sense, one of the most relevant aspects of the novel is the account on the influence the ruling politics had over literature, together with the role and the responsibility of the literary elites in the production of the nationalist narratives and the overall discourse, but also the progressing marketization of literary production and the marginalization of the nonconformist authors. Hence, the dominant narrative line that bonds the fragmented temporal and spatial realms, but also the fragmented identity of the protagonist, is devoted to the theme of writing, that is, the protagonist-narrator’s striving to write. Writing occurs on account of the narrator’s relationship with the two female characters, who both introduce, and what is more, they authorize the act of writing. In part, this occurs through the narrator’s relationship with Višnja, objectified and sexualized as the protagonist’s ladylove, whereas the other woman, Vida Olgina, outstrips the ‘sidekick’ role demonstrating her own ‘narrating capacities’ and becoming vital for the narrator’s writing. Besides the obvious correspondences between the narrator and Vida – she also writes – their identification is founded on, and enabled by the reality of war. It is immediately suggested that the narrator does not differentiate between reality and dreams. He is constantly in an in-between state, somewhere between sleeping and being awake. Being also a metaphor of a hallucinatory-like reality of political crisis, instability and soon the war, this mode of being helps decide the narrator’s status. The illusory ambiance allows the story to be told as if ‘talking in one’s sleep’: “I will tell this story ranting. I decided the style. Vida Olgina makes fun of me. She says there are already too many. Those who ranted perfectly literately./ You are great speaker, but unfortunately illiterate.” (Ibid.:14)12 The narrator authorizes the possibility of contesting and even ridiculing his status: Vida intrudes into the privileged (first person) narrator’s position and openly undermines his authorial credentials (appearing also in the first person). While giving him credits for

11 12

The goldfish. “Ispričaću priču buncajući. Odredio sam stil. Vida Olgina mi se podsmeva. Kaže da ih ima previše. Onih koji su buncali izvanredno pismeno./ Ti si veliki govornik, ali si nažalost nepismen.”

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his spoken language, Vida identifies him as ungrammatical. This confident statement is one of the first signals about her pretensions to narration. Vida’s following ‘writing declaration’, her feminist literary manifesto, explains her perception of the ‘original’ male narrator. She draws a clear line between male and female writers, recognising the “cultural-historical imprint of the sexual matrix inscribed into the literary material” (Čale Feldman and Tomljenović 2012: 29): Gotovo je s muškim piscima, kaže Vida. Nastupa vreme rađanja. Žene su sve bolje. Više ne pišu menstrualne knjige, već rađalačke. Sve što postoji žene su rodile, maco. U stvari, šalim se. Žene su divljač, feministkinje, lezbejke. Nama je mesto u kuhinji. Hoćeš da ti pripremim opojni obrok?‘ (Life: 27) It’s over with the male writers, says Vida. The time of procreation begins. Women are getting better and better. They don’t write menstrual books any longer, but the procreative ones. Honey, women gave birth to everything that exists. In fact, I’m joking. Women are wild animals, feminists, lesbians. We belong in the kitchen. Would you like me to prepare you a spellbinding meal? Vida debunks the misogynist narratives of hysteria (a reference to menstruation), but also appropriates the stereotypical female role in the kitchen. However, this ambiguity is supported by a suggestion that her cooking would clearly involve a witchcraft. She strategically hides her numinous aura behind a mask of a servile housewife. This is further supported by the narrator’s naming of Vida Olgina as a chthonic creature, either a witch or vila, a fairy or a nymph from the Slavonic mythology. While on one side this attribution more clearly designates Vida as a writer’s ghost – or a ‘ghost writer’ – characterizing a female protagonist in these categories in fact suggest a traditional register of women’s (negative) representation. Translated into the everyday reality of the story, the numinous creatures become trivialised and objectified female protagonists, from an author’s mistress to the, at best, critics or readers of the works by the great (male) authors. The male/main narrator’s position demonstrates that men profit “‘from the otherness, the alterity of women’ […] while ‘self has been imagined as transcendent’” (de Beauvoir in Conboy et al. 1997: 2). The diegesis of a privileged male perspective communicates this transcendence, while female characters remain bodies with their limited narrative functions, as that other “trapped in immanence, defined and evaluated by [their] bodily shape, size and functions” (Conboy et al.1997: 2). Yet, precisely this “application of the philosophical categories of Self and Other to the divisions of gender” (ibid.), has been contested by the narrative technique employed in the novel. While the uncertainty about the narrator is the critical ‘symptom’ of this destabilisation, the inequitable relationship among male and female characters is consciously reproduced by using stereotypical literary figures, to be thereon formalised as their parody. The narrator’s and Vida relationship has been portrayed as the distortion

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

of the myth about a muse and her poet, appearing as the account on the insecure and dependent writer and his female companion who rarely inspires him, but most of the time ends up being the commentator and the critic of his writing. Nevertheless, the chthonic metaphoric originates in one particular tradition of associating female characters with the realm of death. One of the most prominent examples of this practise is the romantic trope of the dead beloved. In her study on the misogynist traditions of literary representation of women, Elisabeth Bronfen theorized Poe’s notorious claim about a ‘beautiful female corpse’ being an ideal object of poetry (Bronfen 1992). Different incarnations of the same figure are the idolised ideal woman, the attractive femme fatal and a patron muse, together with a straightforwardly chthonic witch. Either embodying the death or being dead, all of the personas are incorporated by Vida, who remains in that space of ‘otherness’. The very language of this analysis (“incarnations”, “to incorporate”; “to embody”) explains the connection between the corporeal expressions and the narrative: the corporeal narratology theorizes the ways in which “the body contributes to our ways of speaking about and analysing narrative” (Punday 2003: VIII). The presence/absence of the narrator’s body is involved in the process of the narrator’s, that is, writer’s alter ego construction. The ‘conformity’ of the narrator and Vida Olgina has been suggested already in the beginning of the story over emblematic ‘literary exchange’ in prison: “I put my hands through the jail bars. I pass my notes to Vida Olgina. Boring letters pressed inside the matchbox. She gives me her poems hidden inside cigarettes.” (Life: 17)13 Moreover, the narrator discloses his inadequacy, proposing a unity between the two to make up for this ‘defect’. Initially a motif of a romance, the following quote is in effect a statement about the ‘two-faced’ narration: “I will remain being a schizophrenic without you. Only you can put me back together. To make me perfectly two-faced.” (Ibid.: 19)14 While the narrator implies that his authorship is not authentic, he also maintains that this is an optimal writing situation, particularly if one of the two cannot write (anymore). Hence, precisely the situation of writing, of the text production, is the point of identification of Vida and the writer-narrator, recurring in the metaphor of a mirror: Gledam u ogledalce [...]. S druge strane umetnuo sam fotografiju Vide Olgine. (Ibid.: 11) [I look at the mirror [...]. I placed the photo of Vida Olgina behind it.];

13 14

“Proturam ruke između gvozdenih šipki. Dodajem Vidi Olginoj svoje cedulje. Dosadna pisma stisnuta u kutiji šibice. A ona meni svoje pesme skrivene u cigaretama.” “Bez tebe ostaću šizofrenik. Samo ti možeš da me sklopiš ponovo. Da me načiniš savršeno dvoličnim.”

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Ali ja sam se još uvek plašio ogledala. Nisam znao šta su ona. Unutra nikad ne vidim sebe. Vidim majku, oca, Vidu Olginu. Samo ne sebe. (Ibid.: 39) [But I was always afraid of mirrors. I didn't know what they represent. I never see myself in it. I see my mother, father, Vida Olgina. Just not myself.]. Nevertheless, the approaching war complicates the mirror image by the end of the part one. The events culminate in the repression of the police on the streets and Vida’s growing concerns which result in her disability, or unwillingness, to write. However, her ethical stance is not shared by the narrator, still preoccupied with writing, that is, the writer’s block. Supposing Vida is distressed because of that problem, he proposes that they write together (“Pisaćemo oboje.” Ibid.: 55). The next scene is already the opening of the chapter two in which the narrator lies in a hospital injured, but reaffirming his authorial inadequacy as an effect of his physical impairment: “Since I’m a cripple, I’ll be a writer. […] I am a symmetrically mutilated sinful body.” (Ibid.: 59)15 Temporally occurring after the time the narrator spent at the front, his hospital stay and a decision to be a writer based on his physical dispossession is a frame story of the part two which is a war narrative told directly by the narrator as the protagonist of the events at the front. While opening with the information about the narrator’s injury and his stay in the hospital, a frame story ends with a peculiar acknowledgment: Sećam se sebe živog, dok smo još bili u rovovima. (Ibid.: 85) [I remember myself alive, as we were in the trenches.]; Kada smo stigli do prvih kuća bio sam mrtav. (Ibid.: 86) [When we reached the first houses, I was dead.]. This claim could be read metaphorically, as an evidence of a war trauma amnesia, and his repetitive attempt to remember himself and his life before the war. Importantly, he does so through the act of writing (by that fulfilling the demand of writing as remembering). On the other side, the claim could be read literally, whereby he either continues being present as an absurd narrator until the end of the novel, or it becomes more clear that someone else is needed for the story to be completed. Hence, the oblivion, the narrator’s unsuccessful attempt to ‘remember himself’ can clearly be associated to another kind of a void. An illogical confirmation of one’s own death spreads out through the novel, particularly striking when forged as a third person speech: “He cannot remember himself. I am dead, he thinks to himself.” (Ibid.: 117)16 But, if the narrator-protagonist is dead, who is the one writing? Clearly, it could be Vida, as she is since the beginning suggested to be the narrator’s 15 16

“Kad sam već bogalj, biću pisac. […] Ja sam simetrično osakaćeno grešno telo.” “On ne može da se seti sebe. Mrtav sam, misli.”

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

alter-ego, and is herself a writer. The problem is, however, that she still does not want to write: “She started commencing her sentences with: ‘While the people die in the war’. She didn’t want to write anymore.” (Ibid.: 112)17 This recurring dilemma, ascribed to Vida as her ethics of writing in the times of war is in turn a mechanism of the passivization and silencing of Vida as author. Few other fragments lay bare the assumption that Vida had never written whatsoever, but at the same time they underline the fact that she decided the narrator’s writing. Her sleeping necessitates the narrator’s creativity and writing: Jedne noći Vida Olgina zakucala je na moj prozor. Spavala je duplo duže od mene. Čekajući da se probudi, počeo sam da pišem. Čekao da ponovo zaspi da bih nastavio. [...] Čim bih prestao da kucam budila se. (Ibid.: 25) One night Vida Olgina knocked on my window. She slept twice as long as I. While I was waiting for her to wake up, I started writing. Then I waited for her to fall asleep again so I could continue. [...] The moment I would stop typing she would wake up. Yet, while her absence in sleep is a condition of his writing, that the text is produced when she is not present is more ambiguous than it appears. The usage of the verb “kucati” capacitates this ambiguity: it denotes both “knocking” and “typing”. For this reason, it is possible to read the sequence of their activities inversely: once she starts knocking/typing, he stops (“she knocked – zakucala je” vs. “I would stop typing – Čim bih prestao da kucam”). One intimate scene of the protagonists’ conversation helps resolve Vida’s status, and thus the status of writing: Slušaj. Čitaću ti pesmu o gavranu./ Ne, ne volim kad mi čitaš pesme./ Moram. Gavrani, orlovi i druge crne ptice rasteruju zle čini./ Počinjem da čitam. Ona podrhtava. Plače. U transu je./ Vadi kljun iz srca moga!/ U početku možda i glumi. Na kraju vidim da se istinski muči, kao da joj lomim kosti./ ...reče gavran, nikad više.../ Nikada tako nešto neću napisati./ Stenje, teško diše./ Naravno da nećeš, veštice. Znaš kako je ženski rod od pisac? Pička! (Ibid. 27–28) Listen. I will read you a poem about the raven./ No, I don’t like when you read poetry to me./ I have to. Ravens, eagles and other black birds dismiss the evil spell./ I commence reading. She shivers. Cries. She is in a trance./ Take thy beak from out my heart!18 / At first I’m not sure if she pretends. But by the end I realize she truly suffers, as if I’m breaking her bones./ ...quoth the raven “nevermore.”19  .../

17 18 19

“Počela je da sve rečenice započinje sa: ‘dok ljudi ginu’. Više nije htela da piše.” The Raven; English version of the text: The Raven, and Other Selections. Ibid.

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I will never write such a piece./ She moans, breathes heavily./ Of course not, you witch. What’s the feminine for a writer? A twat! A direct quotation from the Raven gets across the theme of knocking on the window by the mysterious night visitor and dissolves the ambiguity among the narrators: Vida is clearly depicted as the dead beloved. Moreover, writing amounts to the sexual intercourse which is then used to diminish the capacity of a woman as author. She is relegated to the bodily, to the alterity she cannot ever overcome. Yet, the paronomastic coupling “pisac/pička” (writer/twat) suggests a successful feminist intervention. A female writer as a twat is a modification of the gynocritical question “Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” (Gilbert and Gubar 2000: 3). The very same bodily and sexualized metaphors stress the female auctorial potency. While Vida is present as the dead beloved, the ‘ideal object of poetry’, virtually not present, it has been suggested that the narrator himself is the one being dead. This could lead to a conclusion that the writing is in a way maintained as the ‘nonwriting’, an uncertain activity of someone who is both present and absent. Being one of the main motifs in the story, the negation, or a denial of writing appears already on the book cover: “Moja braća, svedoci i žrtve poslednjeg rata, mojom su rukom napisala ovu knjigu” (My brothers, the witnesses and victims of the last war, wrote this book by my hand. Ibid.: book cover). The paratextual discourse of the novel enables the interference of what appears to be the author’s own persona. The additional paratextual element enforces this confusion of fiction and facts: the 2007 edition of the novel has the scan of the “bullet hole on the abridged version of the book” (book cover), making the ‘external’ reality linger on this textual ‘threshold’. If the author states that the book was not written by her, that in fact she was just a medium of someone else’s writing, she could clearly be the one hiding behind the repetitive hints in the novel: To sam bio Ja. Pisac koga niko nikad nije video. (Life: 104) [It was Me. The writer nobody has ever seen.]; Napiši ti sve umesto mene. Kad te već niko nije video, mene nek slave. (Ibid.: 105) [Write it instead of me. Since nobody ever saw you, I should be the one who is celebrated.] By the end of the novel, the authorship and narrator’s complex apparently resolve in the narrator’s report about Vida’s death: Danas sam sedam puta odlazio da se šunjam oko demonstranata. Umoran sam. Plačem. Ja sam pička. Ne postojim./ Oslobođen velikog staha, priznajem, ne postoji pisac. Vida je sahranjena u meni na prethodnoj stranici. Sahrani nisam hteo da prisustvujem. Uostalom, ona je mnogo pre smrti odustala od pisanja. Ne, to nije istina./ Moram da učestvujem ili da umrem./ I umrla je. (Ibid.: 142–143)

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

I went prowling around the protesters seven times today. I’m tired. I cry. I’m a twat. I don’t exist./ There is no writer, if there is no great fear. Vida has been buried in me on the previous page. I didn’t want to attend the funeral. She had anyways long before her death given up on writing. No, that is not true./ I must play a part or die./ And she died.

Yet, the self-assertion “I’m a twat. I don’t exist.” is a clear designation of Vida Olgina. What is more, Vida is the one who died and was buried inside the narrator (“Vida has been buried in me”). Also, the issue of the participation in the events of the historical reality have now been formulated as the condition of living (she died because she did not participate), and not as a reality one is detached from, or blocked by. The writer must be engaged, which is an attitude conveyed by the feeling of fear in the quoted fragment. In addition, this passage explicates the gynocritical anxiety of authorship as one of the defining elements of the women’s writing. This third and last chapter, constructed on the alternations of the narrator’s and Vida’s idioms, finally confusing the initial ambiguous positions of both, describes the mentioned narrator’s attempt to write while he hides on Vida’s attic. While this helps the narrator avoid the military police draft, the attic is the signal of a female author’s writing alter-ego, ‘the mad woman in the attic’. Permanent oscillation of the storyteller, the struggle to write, or the writer’s block are all symbols of Vida’s own anxiety of writing, transforming the story of the novel into the tale that “explores the tension between parlor and attic, the psychic split between the lady who submits to male dicta and the lunatic who rebels” (Gilbert and Gubar 2000: 86). The very last part of the novel is in the form of a poem, which is the principal point of a possibility to read the story backward, from the end. After Vida commits suicide, the readers are presented the following poem which also closes the novel, and is hence quoted entirely here: Vidim njeno natrulo telo crve kako se koprcaju u pukotinama oko nokata, srebrni odblesak mosta na zubalu mrtvu i crnu prašinu njene kose iskrivljenu dasku ćivota ali kad se probudim sanjam je živu smejem se plačem

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ćutim umorna nisam mrtva iskežena lobanja bez svog lica glatka ukrasna kost na mom pisaćem stolu20 tražim njene oči u mračnim rupama sve dok ih ne osetim u svojoj glavi u svojim očima: Ja sam Vida. (Life: 143) I see her rotten body worms as they wiggle in the crevices of the nails, a silver reflection of a bridge in the jaws I see her dead and black a dust of her hair a deformed coffin plank but when I wake up I dream of her alive I laugh I cry tired, I keep quiet I’m not dead a grinning skull with no face soft decorative bone on my writing table I seek for her eyes in the dark holes until I sense them in my own head in my own eyes: I am Vida. 21 20

21

The description draws on the vanitas theme in the still life paintings with a motif of a skull symbolising the transience of life, and the certainty of death. I thank Divna Soleil for the insight. Italics added for emphasis.

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

Though the narrative has unfolded as the male narrator’s attempt to write, by the end this narrator could be seen as someone who in fact never wrote: the one who has been writing clearly appears to be Vida Olgina herself. The last line is, for this reason, forged as an affirmative identification: the one writing is Vida. Her final feeling of entitlement to writing is a feminist breaking through into the reality of the literary text, as the producer of the text. Vida’s ‘occupation’ of the narration is precisely the effect of her previous ‘killing the angel in the house’, whether we interpret this Woolfian instruction as the male narrator’s death, or Vida’s suicide prior to her authorial appointing. A “problematically corporeal body” (Punday 2003: 59) of the narrator helped decode this narrative as a type of a ghost story, in which the “ghostly body” (ibid.) suggested the spirit of the dead who cannot write, but also the female ‘ghost writer’ of the novel. Her very body has been a necessary condition of her writing, for when censoring it “you censor breath and speech at the same time” (Cixous 1976: 880).

IV 1.1.

On the Front Line: Trans, Trance

A ‘problematically corporeal body’ is the writing female body, at once the writing living body. The initial withdrawn place of the female narrator – Vida Olgina – transforms alongside the story into the competition for the narrator’s position, to be finally won by Vida in the very end of the novel. Nevertheless, as already suggested, though the signs of the unstable narrator’s position are perceptible from the very beginning, the decisive alternation occurs at the front, that is immediately after it, when the narration had to be taken over from the narrator who “was dead” and only “remembered himself alive”. Second chapter Ispod Vukovara is in this sense crucial for the development of the storyline, but is structurally different. It represents a parenthetic compositional interval of a mimetic ‘transfer’ of war, and is as such different from the other two chapters that surround it, structured diegetically. The mimetic imagery of war, the immediate experience of the narrator, is conveyed precisely owing to ‘writing the body’, or ‘writing from the body’: “the way in which we think about human bodies is inherent to what we can take as the most basic and abstract element of narrative – the way that it conceives of mimesis, the relationship between text and world” (Punday 2003: 53). The transformation culminates in the hospital when the male narrator informs about his “symmetrically mutilated sinful body”, clearly pointing out a de-sexualisation of the narrator’s body who precisely in that moment of losing his masculinity decides to be a writer (Life: 59). Vida Olgina appears only once in the chapter to resonate the narrator’s decision to flee the country in the beginning of war. Again entangled with – or even camouflaged – by the love story, her feeling of abandonment actually ends up in his unsuccessful attempt of exile and return by “flying directly into the war” (ibid.: 85). This episode is, however, linked to the earlier acknowledged disillu-

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sionment of the narrator with the possibility to be Yugoslav. In a conversation with his mother in which she insists he should decide what he is, he presents his Yugoslav national identity to be the matter of choice: “Ok. I’ll be Yugoslav.” (Ibid.: 63)22 As in response to his mother’s answer that it is nonsense, as Yugoslavia is artificial construction, his self-declaration terminates in his small treatise about Yugoslav cynology, known in international circles for its eleven dog breeds. After listing the first ten, he identifies as ‘a Persian’, presumably the non-existing eleventh breed, ridiculing natural ‘ethnonational breed’ classification. A brief exile episode is succeeded by the first-hand experience of war. The mimesis of war unlocks the drastic scenes of death, which are transposed in an absurdist, almost comical mode that confuses the boundaries between the real and the illusory: Stali smo kod prvih kuća. Ugledao sam polovinu vojnika pod šlemom. Trup je pokušavao da aktivira bombu. Imao je sat na ruci. Nikad na filmu nije tako neubedljivo. (Ibid.: 67) [We stopped at the first houses. I saw half of a soldier under helmet. The corps was trying to activate the bomb. He had a watch on his arm. It is never this unconvincing in a movie.]; Poginuo jutros. Ušao u štalu, a tamo neki deda. Deda se uplaši i počne da beži. Ovaj, budala, pojuri za njim preko njive, preko mina. Zbunili se i on i deda, fuh! (Ibid.: 71) [He died this morning. He entered a stall, and saw a grandpa inside. Grandpa frightens and starts running. This guy, what a fool, starts chasing him along the field, over the mines. Oh well, both grandpa and him got confused.]. The other end of the suggested inability to grasp the danger and anguish is an almost lucid confrontation with the horrific real. In these moments, the war is described in either negative terms, or by transgressing the limits of the realistic narration, when the mimetic imagery absorbs the irrational realm in which the evil is personified behind the war scenery: oslobođen je Vukovar, rekao je Srđan. Ulazili smo u Ništa. (Ibid.: 72) [Vukovar is liberated, Srđan said. We were entering the Nothingness.]; Zaustavio sam se pred polovinom sobe. Tapete sa ružičastim cvetovima. Pričinjavalo mi se da čujem smeh. [...]. Krava, ogromna krava nadutog stomaka. Buljio sam u kravu. Ništa ne smrdi, pomislih. Odjednom sretoh dva oka. […] Evo đavola, iz kravinih bokova. On me gleda. Dva užarena smaragda./ Iz krave izađe mačka. Hitro poskoči preko mog ramena i ode u dan mrtvog grada. (Ibid.: 79) 22

“U redu. Biću Jugosloven!”

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

[I stopped in front of one half of a room. Wallpapers with pink flowers. I thought I heard laughter […]. A cow, a huge cow with a swollen stomach. I stared at the cow. It didn’t smell, I thought. In a flash, I saw two eyes. […]. There’s the devil, coming out of the cow’s flanks. It watches me. Two glowing emeralds./ A cat came out of the cow. Jumped briskly over my shoulder and went out into the day of the dead town.]. Reality, which dissolves under the horror of war, turns into a stage on which the narrator and his fellow group of soldiers begin to regularly intrude in the deserted houses. At first normalized, but then almost ritualized invasion of what used to be somebody’s home, involves a type of a travesty: soldiers explore former dwellers’ – who either escaped or where murdered – personal belongings, photographs, they eat their food, and sit in their chairs. At one occasion, the narrator puts on the shoes of a girl who had lived in a house, after spending some time watching her family photographs. A macabre identification takes place: “I continued in her steps.” (Ibid.: 69)23 The use, or at times the appropriation of other people’s belongings, the temporary living the lives of absent others, develops into their impersonations. Yet, the complete identification occurs in the moment the narrator puts on the female clothes they come upon in one of the houses. He metamorphoses into Bakhtinian grotesque body, “open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process and change” (Russo 1997: 325), and starts his Danse Macabre on the stage of war: Ova kuća je imala raskošnu žensku odeću. A ovde je živela neka dobra riba. Pravile su se zabave. Novinar i njegov fotograf bili su razoružani do gole kože, razdragani do daske. […] A vidi ove cipele…/ Stao sam na visoke potpetice. Transvestija rata započela je svoj ples. Brat se pretvorio u sestru. Čovek u ženu. Rat u pozorište. […] Mrtvi su zasvirali na raznim instrumentima. Otpočela je žurka. Žena se sve bešnje vrtela pred nama. Čovek bez glave i bez jedne ruke, počeo je da peva bosansku sevdalinku. Rat je padao u trans. (Life: 81–82) This house possessed gorgeous female clothing. A good-looking chick used to live here. She threw parties. The journalist and his photographer were disarmed down to bare skin, totally high. […] And look at the shoes…/ I stood on the high heels. The transvesty of war began its dance. The brother transformed into the sister. A man into a woman. The war into a stage […] The dead started playing various instruments. The party started. The woman started spinning like wild in front of us. A man without the head and the arm started singing Bosnian sevdalinka. The war was in trance.

23

“Njenim korakom krenuo sam dalje.”

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The chain of associated words ‘travesty-transvesty-trance’ reveals that the narrator’s gender transformation, his gender fluidity is correlated to the warfare. The initial travesty of cross-dressing transforms into a transgender performance, to vanish in a trance, loss of consciousness, but also dissolving of the (war) reality, which becomes a carnivalesque “site of insurgency” (Russo 1997: 325). The ‘transvesty’, could, thus, be seen as the narrator’s anti-war performance, a semiotic practice of communicating the meaning, as well carnivalesque and disruptive (Mitchel 1990: 101). Though gender performativity ought not to be confused with the performance, “it doubtlessly prompts a parody and theatricality” (Zaharijević 2006: 72) embodied in the scene. The narrator’s performance moves and actually crosses the limits of gender/sex and becomes the essential projection of the ‘war theatre’, a new reality, which is mimetically transposed as the only possible experience, that of a trance. However, in the same way the performative act of gender constitutes a new reality: [T]here is no presumption that the act is distinct from a reality […]; that the act is not contrasted with the real, but constitutes a reality that is in some sense new, a modality of gender that cannot readily be assimilated into the preexisitng categories that regulate gender reality […]. Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed. (Butler 1997: 411) The narrator expresses his ‘gender discontent’ already before the trans/trance performance took place. Initially, the self-doubt was articulated as an interiorized homophobic feeling: “I doubted myself already before the war.” (Life: 65)24 Yet, while preserving an ironic stance – possibly affected by the state of the “symmetrically mutilated sinful body” – the narrator accepts the question of gender as a matter of choice, enabling the identification with the ‘third gender’: “I can decide what I will be. [...] For now, I am neuter.” (Ibid.: 73)25 Concluding that he stopped doubting once he met Vida – which evokes his plead to Vida to help him stay perfectly ‘twofaced’ – this gender status enacts also the collision of the male and female narrator, entailing their ‘coupled narration’. Finally, forming of the narrative and characters is principally intertwined with the (in)stability of identity, as the “subject of narration is produced through its own, or somebody else’s discourse” (Ilić 2001: 173). The quote in the epigraph – “My life is in that bit of lead” – is a figure of those murdered by the lead bullet, who cannot testify their own experience. However, it is also a metaphor of writing, the 24 25

“I pre rata sumnjao sam u sebe.” “Mogu tek da odlučim šta ću biti. [...] Za sada sam srednjeg roda.”

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

authorship/existence preserved inside, and by the written text (lead – lead bullet – lead pencil). The responsibility of the narrator for the strange and impenetrable other (Levinas) is materialized in the text, which appears in front of us written by the “wounded body”: When bodies write (and particularly when wounded bodies write), they will use the language of the body to touch on sense. They will protest against the ‘unspeakable’, the ‘limit’, and the ‘impossible’ by speaking, by spitting fragments at anyone who will listen, by opening veins, by stumbling, by leaping, by incomplete mapping, by entering the gap or the gape. (Eades 2017: 192) The mask of the male narrator Vida Olgina needed to put to tell her story concludes with her exposure. Yet, together with this necessary demystification of the intrinsic “masquerade of the feminine” (Russo 1997: 321), putting on the mask of the dead, ‘writing by their hand’ is a possibility to “to continue the lives of those whose lives were taken away before their time” (Šalgo). The narrator’s substitution has been a part of this continuation after the narrator-protagonist was murdered and never returned from the war, like the brothers, “witnesses and victims”, to whom the author dedicated her book.

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IV 2.

Luka Bekavac’s Drenje and Viljevo: Beyond Severed Ends of Space and Time Sama ideja da na jednom neodređenom mjestu, u nekom životu koji ne poznajemo, postoje osobe poput nas, žene i muškarci koji s nama žele kontaktirati i čuti naš glas, pomisao na to da smo nekome za koga uopće ne znamo važni, predstavlja izvor osjećaja gubitka kojega se više nismo oslobodili, a možda postane i ključ kojim ćemo jednom objasniti intenzivnu vezanost za te nepoznate ljude tokom onih tjedana u kolovozu 1943. godine. (Luka Bekavac)26   I am not fully known to myself, because part of what I am is the enigmatic traces of others. (Judith Butler)27

Luka Bekavac (b. 1976 in Osijek) published his first novel Drenje in 2011, and for the second, Viljevo (2013), the author was awarded the Janko Polić Kamov prize as its first ever recipient in 2014. While both of the novels have had a comprehensive reception, Viljevo has been also awarded the European Prize for Literature in 2015. Novel Policijski sat: slutnje, uspomene (The Curfew: Forebodings, Memories, 2015) has been published as the last among the three, completing a kind of trilogy, to be succeeded by the collection of stories Galerija likovnih umjetnosti u Osijeku: studije, ruševine (The Visual Arts Gallery in Osijek: Studies, Ruins, 2017). As stated in the beginning, Luka Bekavac already has a status of an important authorial figure, certainly maintained by his academic and critical writings.28 Besides fiction, Bekavac regularly publishes

26

27 28

The very idea that in some unspecified place, in a life unknown to us, exist people like us, women and men who want to communicate with us and hear our voice; the thought that we are important to somebody we don’t at all know of is the source of the feeling of loss that we cannot eliminate, and which will possibly become a key to explaining the intense attachment to these unknown people during those weeks in August 1943, one day. (Viljevo: 310–311) Butler 2004: 46. The 2018 academic conference on post-Yugoslav literature Lost Discontinuity, Lost Fragmentarity: Conflict, Composition and Temporalities of Post-Yugoslav Literature(s) and Culture(s) at the University of Rijeka had the whole panel dedicated to Bekavac. The conference book is in

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

texts on literary theory, philosophy, popular culture and (experimental) music. That his fiction is informed by his research (and possibly the other way around) shows also his study on Derrida and deconstruction Prema singularnosti: Derrida i književni tekst (Towards Singularity: Derrida and the Literary Text, 2015). Deconstruction and theorization of experimental music can in fact help decipher the difficult textuality in the two novels, and their fables that apparently resist representation. Correspondingly experimental is the following analysis that focuses on the few – though very relevant – aspects of this writing. Even though they are not part of any conscious strategy, the feminist motifs and the subject of female authorship, crossed with the exploration of the temporal and spatial sides of remembering (the war) are the theme of the analysis. Also, though the various (Neo-)avant-gardist references and techniques are only indicated, the aim of the analysis has been to show “the second line” continuities in the post-Yugoslav literary field. They are critical in establishing the link among Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literatures, and I would further discuss them in the Chapter VI. The first two novels of Bekavac’s trilogy, Drenje and Viljevo, narrativize the occurrence of uncanny sounds in the Croatian hinterland. The two texts in part investigate the transfiguration of the pure or discrete sounds into the act of communication (through “transmissions”) between those who remained “beyond the severed ends”, both temporal and spatial. The first novel is structured as a comparatively conventional narrative that could be read inside the science fiction and mystery matrix, while in the second the story transforms into the experimental discourse hypothetically representing those noises of an unknown origin, emerging in and by the text of the novel. In Drenje the sounds become the object of the scientific investigation of the protagonists, professor Marković and his assistant Marta. In Viljevo the story and the protagonists are dependent on the very textuality of the novel and materialize along the process of the text production. Moreover, the intrinsic bond between time and space in the two novels is disconnected, whereby they become virtually independent realities, in Drenje possible to interpret as space outside the time, and as time outside the space in Viljevo. Yet, though the composition of time and space in the two novels structurally disintegrates, the abstracted realities involve historical materiality of recent and with it entangled more distant past, suggesting a possibility of interpreting the uncanny sounds as a collective – presumably also unconscious or tabooed – experience of war. As real toponyms in the area of Baranja in Slavonia, Drenje and Viljevo reveal a historical actuality behind abstracted ‘non-chronotopic’ entities. While the literary figuration of chrontope is a “concrete whole” (Bakhtin 1981: 84) embodying the “inseparability of space and time” (ibid.), their splitting up in the two novels denaturalises history and geography press (Disclosing (Post)-Yugoslav Time: Towards the Temporal Turn in Critical (Post)-Yugoslav Studies, BRILL).

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that have been narrated. Also, evoking Ivana Bodrožić’s war novel, the choice of the setting intertwines the autobiographical (the author’s hometown is in the region of Slavonia) and the historical motives, returning to the frontline of the 1991–1995 war in Croatia. The story of Drenje is set within the post-war ambient of contemporary Croatia. Researchers’ team, professor Marković and his assistant Marta, attempt to record the mysterious sounds, speculating that they exist on a border with the known reality, behind the limits of the familiar world. The village to which they came to do their research is depicted as an anti-utopian space reverberating with the recent and distant past, but also slowly and mysteriously decaying. The space is not invisible or neutral surroundings in which the protagonists dwell. In the opening scene, it is represented as an autonomous visual interval, turning almost into a protagonist of its own, detached from the temporal dimension which appears to be absent, or outside the frame. The image that would reappear in the fable is a stilllife, or a frozen film frame showing a destroyed and deserted unidentified area. While it remains elusive what the intricate picture communicates, it clearly indicates the atmosphere of horror. A wire and an abandoned house which bares traces of violence, a catastrophe, constitute the imagery of the site emptied of sounds or anything living, together with the air which is consumed, as the narrator registers. Nevertheless, the still-moment is disturbed by the sudden detection of hallucinatory silhouettes of people in the background: Način kojim pokreti krošnji navode sjene da se protežu i grče po tim zidovima na trenutak stvara dojam da pored dovrataka druge, dublje sobe stoje dvije ljudske prilike teško odredivoga spola (Bekavac 2011: 7, 92)29 The way in which the treetops are waving prompts the shadows to stretch and crouch along the walls for a moment creates an impression that next to the doorframe of a long, deep room there are two human silhouettes whose sex is difficult to determine. While it is not clarified who the people are, or who they might be, the narrator points out the fact about their sex being “difficult to determine”. A calamitous ambiance contains this surplus information about the humans difficult to ‘tell apart’ from the whole bizarre scenery, but also difficult to identify as sexes. Which kind of “textual objects” are they, if “we recognize that it is impossible to tell a story without drawing on human bodies and thus entangling corporeality within the narrative, [while] those bodies must always be shaped into meaningful textual objects by specific choices made by the text” (Punday 2003: 57)? A scene Marta later 29

For the legibility the quotes from the novel Drenje will be henceforth referenced by the novel’s title.

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

observed on the village road coincides with this initial image of gender indistinctiveness: “First appears the couple, in which the woman – first one that Marta saw among the locals – appears to be dominating the situation; that asexual silhouette, who doesn’t look like a peasant.” (Drenje: 56)30 Marta witnesses the scene of violence, observed silently also by a few remaining villagers: the married couple and a man accompanying them pass by, staggering along the village road, drunk and fighting. While this time Marta as the focaliser makes a remark about the sex of a woman – perceiving her as asexual – she also adds that she does not look like a local. This commentary might suggest that this kind of environment further enforces the “duress” of gender identity (Butler 1997: 405) and penalizes its indecisiveness. Yet, in both pictures human figures emerge from the space, they are connected to and defined by it. The author also clarified this technique in an interview, by stressing the prevalence of space and a parallel and mutual construction of characters and “ambiences, spaces, situations that are as a rule more interesting material than the characters themselves” (Bekavac in Bakić 2014). In this sense, the gender fuzziness is the symptom of the disfigurement of the space, incomplete without the other necessary dimension of time. In other words, gender is an index of this absence of time, for gender itself is, if tenuously, “constituted in time”: [G]ender is in no way a stable identity of locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self (Butler 1997: 402). Butler’s theorization shows that gender is not a substantial, but a temporal model of identity, it is “a constituted social temporality” (ibid.). Butler defines gender as “concrete and historically mediated expression in the world” (ibid: 403), by reminding of other authors’ defining of body and gender in historical terms: as a historical idea, a historical situation by Merleau-Ponty, or de Beauvoir’s “historical situation rather than a natural fact […] consolidated through time” (ibid.: 406). Seemingly paradoxical, gender which is an act, which “can neither be true nor false, neither real nor apparent” (ibid.: 413) points up the ‘defect’ in the reality, in which time – as history – is omitted. Yet, this singling out of history as ‘absent’ gives weight to it and could be read as a comment on the social consensus about silencing and even tabooing the unpleasant past. Clearly affecting the narrative itself, this difficulty of

30

“Prvo se ukaže par u kojem žena, prva koju je Marta uopće vidjela među domaćim stanovnicima, izgleda kao da dominira situacijom; ta aseksualna prilika, koja ne izgleda kao seljanka”.

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sorting “bodies from nonbodies” (Punday 2003: 58) demonstrates that the distinction depends “largely on the historical and cultural context out of which it comes” (ibid.). The ‘nonbodies’ eventually occupy the narrative reality. Human figures are in transition or they completely dissolve: instead of a human on the observed screen, there are fragments that at first form a stain, which subsequently takes shape of a creature close to human, but not human. The initial still-frame of a catastrophe aftermath is variated intensifying the reality of human disintegration: [U] jednom se trenutku učini da je nekakva mrlja prošarala ekran, da bi odmah zatim nestala. [...] mrlja poprima sasvim drugačije i oštrije obličje: ramena, ruke i leđa mogu se jasno razlikovati od glave, kugle guste, smeđe kose koja se vjerojatno doima crvenkastom samo zbog razlijevanja boje s odjeće [...]; bezoblična tamna ogrebotina sada definitvno izgleda humanoidno, poput nekoga tko promatra panoramu možda s uzvisine, snimljen s leđa (Drenje: 127–128). In one moment it seems as if a stain cut across the screen, and disappeared right away […] the stain acquires completely different and sharper form: shoulders, arms and back can be easily differentiated from a head, a ball of thick, brown hair which probably appears reddish only because of the reflection of the clothes’ colour […] amorphous dark scratch now definitely looks humanoid, like somebody that observes a panorama, maybe from a height, captured from the back. As there is no human body to be represented, and body is “a way to balance suspicion toward representation” (Punday 2003: 2), the human is symbolised by a crossed figure on a traffic sign, indicating either a ban, or the final extinction: [J]arkožuta ploča s imenom mjesta koje, pretpostavilo bi se, leži negdje dalje niz put: ‘Novi Bezdan’. Ispod i iznad ploče postavljeno je još nekoliko znakova [...]; opasnost od požara, prestanak svih zabrana, te još jedna ploča nedefiniranog oblika u čijem je središtu prekrižena ljudska silueta (Drenje: 7–8). A bright yellow plate with the name of the place that, you would guess, lies somewhere down the road: ‘New Abyss’. Under and above the plate a few more signs are installed […] fire danger, end of all restrictions, and another plate of an undefined shape which had the crossed human silhouette in its centre. A still-life in the highly stylized landscapes that exist in a vacuum outside the flow of time replaces the real life, as the body which “makes setting unstable and forces constant movement” (Punday 2003: 14) is missing. A trance/trans performance in Andrejević’s novel has destabilized the setting, being at once the gender act and the inevitable change in social reality it ‘always already’ constitutes. Yet, what could be read as a science fiction, or supernatural mystery aspect of the story offers more

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

optimistic prospects for humans. The gender in this context remains also undecided, but not as an effect of the actual impossibility to ‘perform oneself’. On the contrary, gender ambiguousness indicates the possibility of enacting a new reality. Professor Marković seeks to find a passage to the “other side”, signalled by the sounds he and his assistant Marta try to catch and record. The legend-instruction left by the earlier researcher Schlesinger edifies that if “the old man is a woman… the window is ajar” (Drenje: 113)31 . Not only the body, but the space is clearly discovered as ‘two-sided’, the mentioned window clearly referring to the window ‘to the other side’. Possibly drawing on the figure of the prophet Tiresias, who had the gift of clairvoyance and was transformed into a woman, points out that this kind of liminality enables seeing ‘the other side’; a specific gender status, in the amalgam of unintelligible, multilingual and disconnected data appears as a kind of instruction for understanding the “transmission from the other zone” (ibid.: 112)32 . Space dispossessed from time in this liminal realm turns fluid, it vibrates as it were, and becomes ‘temporalized’. The second novel Viljevo is devoted to exploring this other dimension, and is focused on the quality and the source of the unfamiliar sounds which apparently arrive from another time dimension. Viljevo is structured on the experimental story telling that expands the topic of the investigation from the first novel, by enacting what appears to be going deeper inside the supernatural reality of the recorded sounds. As in the physical sense a sound vibrates, or travels through a medium (it is impossible in a vacuum), the quality of received sounds suggests a continuity with the past, wherefrom the sounds appear to be coming in the first place. This affects the architecture of the narrative: “Doesn’t the most direct, physical, pre-reflective, sensory contact with the text occur precisely in those experimental areas, which is only then followed by a ‘direct identification’ with the story, lives of the protagonists etc.?” (Bekavac in Bakić 2014) The account of successive events is missing, but it is possible to distinguish two main layers of the story: one is the direct narration of the protagonists of the historical events tackled in the novel, while the other appears to represent an attempt of fixing the ‘live’ testimonies in codes, when the narrative transforms – or breaks up – into a text. The narrated fragments assembly the story about the two Jewish young women, sisters, who during the Second World War hide from the deportation and accidently find a way to communicate with an illegal group of communists who had their secret radio station. Concrete historic events appear in the text as an irregular ‘intrusion’ of the words like “persecution”, “the dead”, “holocaust”, all uttered by the two sisters, making the experience of war become not only real, but immediate:

31 32

“Ako je starac žena… prozor je odškrinut”. “transmisiju iz drugog pojasa”.

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[K]ao nekad, u vrijeme zbjegova, […] kao da je u slučaju onakve katastrofe bilo moguće sastaviti popis poginulih i nestalih, usred holokausta [nerazgovjetno] ostavljao čak niti tijela (Viljevo: 25) [Like before in the times of fleeings […] as if it was possible to make a census of the dead and missing in the case of such a catastrophe, in the middle of holocaust [illegible] left no trace of the bodies]; odmah nakon [katastrofe] su počeli s likvidacijama, sustavno su istrijebili sve koji su imali ikakve veze s izgradnjom eterske infrastrukture... nakon toga nije trebalo puno da počnu i spontani linčevi, progoni, zbjegovi, novo kraljevstvo nepismenosti (ibid.: 37) [they started with the liquidations immediately after [the catastrophe], and they exterminated systematically all who had something to do with the ether infrastructure… after that it didn’t take long before the spontaneous lynchings began, persecutions, refuges, the new kingdom of illiteracy]. This eyewitness experience referred to as the “catastrophe” locates the theme of the Second World War – together with more recent Yugoslav wars – in a post-apocalyptic scenery of a science-fiction/mystery story. While the science-fiction motifs in Drenje structure peculiar liminal spaces ‘leaking’ the uncanny noises, in Viljevo they are integrated into the (pseudo-)scientific discourse. The most important information about the ‘communication’ is located in the footnote of a ‘scientific article’ in which professor Marković writes that the “second circle” of communication in Viljevo repeated in 1985 and 1986 (Viljevo: 311–312, fn 20). As the direct references primarily concern the persecution of the Jewish people by the Ustasha in the NDH, the narrated war is clearly the Second World War, but the discreet and at the same time precise equivalences indicate also the Yugoslav wars (also, the mid and late eighties could be interpreted as the last years of Yugoslavia). This past time abruptly breaks in in the present as a memory that “flashes up at a moment of danger” (Benjamin 1968: 255). Professor Marković could be that Benjamin’s man “singled out by history at a moment of danger” to whom the past “unexpectedly appears” (ibid.). Again, history is denaturalised: “category of historicity is supressed in favour of the logic of a-locality and a-chronicity” (Viljevo: 304)33 . But the fact that the historicity is supressed does not make the reality of the novel a-historical, rather, it makes it historical in an unusual, and unrestricted sense. Historical time is not split in discrete phases. “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit]” (Benjamin 1968: 261):

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“potiskuje kategoriju povijesnosti u korist logike nelokalnosti i akronije”.

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

[R]astvara se iluzija vremenski linearno organiziranog titranja “dnevnog” EM frekvencijskog pojasa, a izranja – na razini koja nikad neće postati potpuno dostupna nekakvoj svijesti ili znanosti – “stvarna”, atemporalna priroda postojanja, kao jedna i sinkrona sveprisutnost (statička aktivnost) globalnog vala/ čestice (Viljevo: 296). the illusion of the temporary linear organized vibrating of the ‘daily’ EM frequency belt dissolves, and a ‘real’, a-temporal nature of existence, as a single and synchronic omnipresence (static activity) of the global wave/ particle emerges on the level that will never become completely accessible to a consciousness or science. Though clearly impenetrable by the scientific methods, the sounds coming from the ‘other dimension’ that materialize as the two women’s voices, had been for the first time observed by the illegals, to be re-discovered by the professor Marković (and his son, also a scientist) and interpreted in the mentioned scientific article. Though the scientific discourse of professor Marković’s and his son represent a plausible attempt to decode the transmissions which emerged out of ‘nowhere’, a status of any ‘fact’ remains instable, possibility of any certainty ambiguous: “(I am) still here, but… also elsewhere’” (ibid.: 18)34 . Their science involving the study of the sounds is called “transkomunikacija” (trans-communication), possibly revealing the limits of its own methodology in its name. On one hand suggesting a pseudoscientific theory, on the other, a science fiction possibility of not regular, but ‘trans’ communication, that is, communication with something and someone beyond the physical world. Yet, in both cases the principal ambiguity, simultaneous delivery of, and a failure in communication, are inscribed in the very probability of interaction: The postal system (Derrida’s name of the circuit of communication) insist upon a structural deferral or postponement inhabiting the very heart of the dream of telecommunications. The message that might fix the identity of a sender or addressee of a previous message is precisely that, another message, which the sender and addressee would require in turn to be established, and so on in nonfinite series. (Elam 1997: 193) While the mode, that is the possibility of communication conditions the type of message – which apparently can be only coded, it is a code – the communication is correlated to subjectivity, whose dispersion is “a structural necessity that both constitutes and confounds communication” (Elam 1997: 193). Message as the code, a numeric one, or the non-referential noise the researchers capture undermines the need of representation. Those who could be represented by the codes are virtually

34

“još uvijek ovdje, ali... i negdje drugdje”.

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impossible to detect. But, unlike the ‘nonbodies’ of the vacuum-like spaces, the inapplicability of representation means that instead of mere ‘speaking in the name of the other’, this writing develops as a first-hand communication, the “moment of happening”. In this sense the matter of time, its elapsing in the moment of the text production is analogous to the avant-gardists artistic happenings, the so-called “exhibitions-actions” in which the performance was “at the same time the realisation” (Žmak 2008). Bearing in mind the obvious difference among the literary and the visual-performing arts, the intention to give up the function of representation, and stress instead the process of the text production that inevitably cancels its “illusionist, fictional potential” (ibid.) is the apparent literary technique in the novel. ‘Processuality’ as displaying the very process of becoming, “moment of happening” (ibid.) was one of the main artistic principles of the prominent Yugoslav Croatian avant-gardist Group of Six Artists. Like Derrida’s postal system, in their exhibitionsactions the “moment of definity, of the completion of the work is constantly postponed, which thereby accomplishes […] the ideal position of work which is in constant phase of realization, never to be fully realized” (ibid.). Moreover, in his article about Bora Ćosić’s novel Tutori (Custodians, 1978) Bekavac remarks that Ćosić creates a “particular type of ‘realism’ in which the (targeted) reality is not imitated by literature, but is, in its materiality, originally included in the text” (Bekavac 2017: 517). Both of the authors draw on the Benjamininan and avant-gardists possibilities of non-referential ‘representation’, while Bekavac also affirms that Ćosić “activates the heritage of the Neo-avant-garde” (ibid.). As stated, one layer of the novel is organized as a coded text, not even linguistic, but numerical: numerical codes are the text. Primarily understood as codes which ‘cover’ the story from the past, compelling its decoding, they actually mark the intrusion of the past in the present (of the text), particularly having in mind that they appear without the recipients’ will or approval. Again, the lines of zeroes and ones (on the non-paginated pages of the novel) as the codified content offer not much information, but enable communication. The recorded noises stress the communication as the ‘science’ of encoding and decoding (the “identity of a sender or addressee”). While the author affirmed his interest in the situations in which “the fable is a ‘generator’ of atypical formal choices” (Bekavac in Bakić 2014), this textual strategy could be related to the practices of the concrete poetry. Referring to Ćosić, Bekavac in the already quoted article in fact defines his own literary technique ‘estrangement’: “verbal and typographic elements are used as the material free of syntactic or semantic functions and prone to free visual and phonetic combinations” (Bekavac 2017: 517). In addition, a reference from Bekavac’s article helps interpret the frozen image from the novel Drenje as a process of “discontinuing of the story by spatializing it” (ibid.: 514). Together with connecting to the traditions of ‘trans-Yugoslav’ avant-gardes, Bekavac structures one particular modus of remembering by this textual ‘process-

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

ing’. Communication in the moment of happening is inscribed in the text as that “synchronic omnipresence” of the dead and the living, confusing also a one-directional communication between the ‘sender’ and the ‘addressee’ of the message that Derrida theorized. The quote from the epigraph about “women and men who want to communicate with us and hear our voice” can, be, thus understood not only as remembering or trying to recover the voices from the past, but also, as the fact that we are ‘heard’ and ‘missed’ by those we think we alone commemorate: Who will prove that the sender is the same man, or woman? And the male or female addressee? Or that they are not identical? To themselves, male or female, first of all? That they do not form a couple? Or several couples? Or a crowd? Where would the principle of identification be? In the name? No, and then whoever wants to make a proof becomes a participant in our corpus. They would not prevent us from loving each other. (Derrida 1987: 234) The “feeling of loss that we cannot eliminate” establishes the memory as ethics, at the same time making it an essential element of our feeling of identity based on the “enigmatic traces of others” (Butler). The first sentence of the novel – “There is no end.”35 – corresponding to the cyclical structure of Andrejević’s Životu je najteže, reveals the circularity of ‘tele-’, or ‘trans-’communication in the structure of writing, but also in the relationship of love. The paradox of codes, that are, like Derrida’s post cards, “neither legible nor illegible, open and radically unintelligible” (Derrida 1987: 79), points to the “paradox of love” (Blagojević 2002: 222). Letters-codes are always written in multiple voices of those who in an interrupted circuit exchange messages, explaining also the paradox of time and space in this novel.

IV 3.

The Medium is the Message: Female Voices and Sound Prvi šok je nastupio kad smo pojačali zvuk tako da se bolje čuju intervali tišine, odnosno smetnje [...], čulo se nešto što je zvučalo kao ženski glas (Luka Bekavac)36

Circular communication, nonetheless, seems to have a woman or women on one of its ‘ends’. The presumption that together with the topic of remembering the dead, there is a female voice or female voices as constitutive for the reappearance of the 35 36

“Nema kraja.” (Viljevo: 7) The first thing which came as a complete shock happened as we turned the volume up so we could hear the intervals of silence, that is, the interference [...], we heard something that sounded like a female voice (Viljevo: 288).

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absent inside the text, impelled the comparison with Andrejević’s novel Životu je najteže. Motivated also by the theme of war, particular type of ‘analytical narration’ and the specific distinctions between ‘bodies and nonbodies’ the two novels share, the comparison highlighted the aspects in Viljevo which can help conceptualise the correlation among the female authorship, war writing and remembering. The gender of the narrator, that is, the author of the story, is a structural aspect of the storytelling in Andrejević’s novel; in Bekavac’s novel this relationship is possible to reconstruct in a subsequent feminist analysis. In the already-quoted interview, the author confirmed his neutral and uninterested approach to the – possibly suggestive – question about the female protagonists in his first two novels.37 While the author opposes the exploitation of stereotypical female characters who are a mere index of male characters’ qualities and often represent a misogynist literary projection, he refutes a ‘tendentious’ feminist agenda (“as if I would want to prove a point”; Bekavac in Bakić 2014).38 Yet, though not accepting “structural difference” between male and female characters, his earlier stated preference for spaces and ambiences that are constructed parallel and mutually with the characters, suggests that the setting of the novel in fact necessitated the ‘emergence’ of female protagonists. They, on the other side ‘assembled’ the ambiance around them, as a medium through which they could communicate. A first-person plural feminine narration – by the two sisters – predominantly informs the reading before it becomes possible to understand the temporal and spatial contours of the narrated fragments. Nevertheless, besides this diegetic attribution, there are signs spread out through the story as traces that require elucidation and integration into the main story of the sisters. They are diverse feminist motifs, like the cryptic passage structured by the astronomical and alchemic vocabulary and concepts that – only after a careful deciphering – suggest a variation of the creation myth (Viljevo: 53–54). A number of mythological and cultural references construct a critical, arguably even counter-myth of creation which employs female maternal figures to address childlessness of the two sisters. The whole context suggests the polysemantic of the ‘female productiveness’, and plays with its biological

37 38

The feminist author Asja Bakić interviewed Bekavac and published their conversation on her web page U carstvu melanholije. Elaborating the conceptualisation of the female protagonists Bekavac asserted that “their motivation and the ‘deep’ elaboration is based in the simple fact that they don’t represent ‘Women’, i.e. embodiments of this or that archetype, dolls that in the text play their standard astral-misogynist role for the man-protagonist: they are characters like any other… It is pitiful if they are special for this, it is obvious what that means: literature is dominated, at least statistically, by an impersonal ‘Woman’, that few would identify with – reduced to a requisite, a result of the appropriation […], object of someone’s desire, fear or hatred, therefore, an index of certain characteristics of the male protagonist, a stereotype, and not an independent fictional entity (Bekavac in Bakić 2014).

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

and metaphoric meanings. Women as protagonists, and particularly as narrators, summon certain themes, and almost instantaneously introduce the problem of female authorship. After the persecution, two sisters live in a refuge where they are safe, but also invisible and isolated from the rest of the world: [A] nas dvije ostajemo u Viljevu, dva zrna pijeska na dnu nekog podmorskog grotla, konačno sasvim sigurne, potpuno beznačajne, potpuno nevidljive: cijeli taj rat, uspon i pad, svaka nada, svaka prijetnja, svako kretanje, sve je gotovo (ibid.: 48) and the two of us remain in Viljevo, two sand grains on the bottom of the submarine abyss, finally completely secure, completely insignificant, completely invisible: the war, ascent and fall, every hope, every threat, every motion, all is over. Their invisibility signifies both the past as the absent time, and the identity of ‘the absent other’, which has to do not exclusively with the opposition living/dead, but the gender at the same time. The women’s reaching out in the outer world is a necessary precondition of their life ‘for us’, as the knowledge about their lives, but also, the very communication of the past is apparently integral to the two sisters’ auctorial emancipation. The motifs of anxiety recur and intensify in a multiple sensory ‘non-recognition’, which in fact gradually suggests a ‘more-dimensional’ woman behind the imperceptibility: [I]ako nisam sigurna u čemu bi bila bitna razlika, sve to i onako ide u vjetar, nitko ne čuje (Viljevo: 18) [though I am not sure what would make the big difference, it will all be trifled away anyways, nobody hears]; nitko neće pročitati ono što ona piše, sasvim sigurno, nitko to nikada neće vidjeti (ibid. 51) [nobody will read what she writes; most certainly, nobody will ever see it]. The “moment of danger” (Benjamin 1968: 255) necessitates the change in their ‘means of expression’: [A]li moj pravi stroj je oduvijek bio šivaći stroj, šivaći stroj ili tkalački stan, kao što je Elizin pravi stroj oduvijek bio čembalo [...], ali mislim da je sada s tim gotovo, sada je njen pravi stroj pisaći stroj, sasvim sigurno (Viljevo: 41) But my real machine has always been a sewing machine, sewing machine or a loom, the way Eliza’s real machine has always been cembalo […], but I think that now it is over, now her real machine is the typing machine, for sure.

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While neither of the two original machines are necessarily impeding for women, only the typewriter is the medium enabling the needed communication. Yet, the trouble with the author, that is, the situation in which somebody else is writing, also repeats in Viljevo, evoking the writer’s double as the figure of the anxiety of writing: “and when I take a glance at that rubble of numbers and letters, I don’t understand a thing any longer, as if it were all really written by somebody else” (ibid.: 36)39 . Curiously, experts who recorded the sounds could not confirm the exact location and identity of persons whose voices were recorded, at the same time verifying that the sounds were human, and communicated “from the other side” by the two or sometimes three women: “The first thing which came as a complete shock happened as we turned the volume up so we could hear the intervals of silence, that is, the interference [...] we heard something that sounded like a female voice.” (Ibid.: 288)40 To hear the silence better, and the female voice issuing from it, is a suggestive feminist statement. The scientists paradoxically conclude that their doubt “cannot hinder the authenticity of the identifications, nor relocate them in the sphere of fiction – it, however, reasserts certain interpretations” (Viljevo: 293)41 . Indeed, the identity of the speaking subject is persistently disrupted (Elam 1997: 182). The mark of this paradox is the materialization of the women in the text, construing the question of authorship as not merely a negative process of dispossession, but the realization of the possibility that the other writes, that is, speaks, removing the intermediator: Na kraju se ispred nas ukazala osoba od krvi i mesa, zapravo u mnogo čemu slična nama, izložena progonima i stradanjima, a zatim zahvaćena nekom svojom revolucijom koja ju je prisilila na izolacju i rad u ilegali. I dalje smo bolno svjesni visoke vjerojatnosti da takva osoba ne postoji, niti je ikada postojala, ali sada nam se čini da je bilo primjerenije odmah se zapitati o tomu što se događa s onima koji šalju poruke, te zašto smo odabrani baš mi (Viljevo: 310) Eventually a person in flesh and blood appeared in front of our eyes, alike us in many ways, exposed to persecution and suffering, and then seized by her own revolution, which compelled her to isolation and illegal work. We are furthermore painfully aware of the high probability that such a person does not and did not ever exist, though now it seems more adequate to ask right away what happens to those who send messages, and why they chose us to communicate with. 39 40 41

“i kad bacim pogled na taj krš brojeva i slova, više ne razumijem ništa, kao da je to stvarno pisao netko drugi”. “Prvi šok je nastupio kad smo pojačali zvuk tako da se bolje čuju intervali tišine, odnosno smetnje [...] čulo nešto što je zvučalo kao ženski glas”. “ne mijenja ništa na autentičnosti identifikacija, niti ih pomiče u sfere fikcije – dapače, samo čini opravdanijima neke interpretacije”.

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

The replica of the female protagonist in the text emerges as a result of her speaking. Like Vida Olgina in Andrejević’s novel, the female protagonist in Viljevo struggles but then succeeds in occupying the text. By uttering a voice she presents herself and establishes the connection to the present, disclosing the ‘circuit of communication’: “the traces are evident only afterwards [...]... nobody is ever alone... it is sufficient to write down a letter, to utter a sound, and the connection can be established” (ibid. 27)42 . In Andrejević’s text the writing ensues as the non-writing until Vida Olgina reveals her position as the narrator. Bekavac’s female author admits that the transmissions are “not the real text”. Indeed, she herself is the text: [D]oduše, ovo nije pravi tekst, ali zapravo se svodi na isto... kad bi netko ovo čuo, mogao bi me zamisliti kao da pišem: ruka drži olovku, vrh ostavlja trag na papiru i nastaju ove riječi, ali zapravo nema papira, nema olovke, nema ruke, samo glas koji se raspršuje [...]; eto, možda baš tako: spuštam ruku i uranjam prst u tu smeđu magnetsku struju, kao da pišem u pijesku, ostavljam trag na vrpci, a ona sve to zadržava i sve bi mi to, barem u teoriji, mogla vratiti, kao nekakva strojna replika mene same, dvojnica koja bi mi prenijela sve što je čula (ibid.: 59) Frankly speaking, this is not the real text, but it is all the same in the end anyways... if somebody hearing this would imagine me writing: the hand holds the pen, its tip leaves the trace on the paper and these words appear, but there is actually no paper, no pen, no hand, just the voice, dispelling [...] yes, precisely that way: I lower my hand and immerse the finger in the brown magnetic stream, as if I’m writing on the sand, I leave a trace on the tape, it preserves it all and could, at least in theory, return it to me, similar to a machine replica of myself, a double which would communicate all that she heard to me. The recipient, the addressee necessary for the circuit to function is the one making possible the memory, but also literature, which is “not real” if there is no lived experience: “No exposition, no discursive form is intrinsically or essentially literary before and outside of the function it is assigned or recognized by a right, that is, a specific intentionality inscribed directly on the social body.” (Derrida 2000: 28) The hand immersed in the brown magnetic stream invokes the absent brothers who “wrote the book by the hand” of the narrator in Andrejević’s novel. Writing, as an address, does not exist beyond the relationship with the other we ‘are compelled’ to communicate with: What Butler argues […] is that we are ethically implicated in the lives of others precisely to the extent that we cannot control language […]. For her, the ‘you’ is 42

“tek se kasnije vidi kakve je to sve tragove ostavilo [...]... nitko nikada nije sam... [...] dovoljno je zapisati jedno slovo, izgovoriti jedan glas, i veza je uspostavljena”.

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a necessary condition of ‘I’ since there can be no account of myself which exists outside the structure of an address, which exists outside the norms of language, even if the addressee remains ‘implicit and unnamed, anonymous and unspecified’. […] This failure or lack of knowledge can create an ethical relation to the Other. (Anderson 2006: 125) Butler’s linguistic conceptualization of subjectivity also ‘counts on’ the “lack of knowledge” suggested by interferences, silences and finally the sounds-codes in the novel Viljevo, which are the “dark thing, that other” (Andrejević 2007: 95). In Levinas’ words, “moral consciousness is not an experience of values, but an access to exterior being” (Levinas in Critchley 2002: 15). This access is enabled by a specific kind of communication, material and aesthetic in its nature, the sound – their voices. The sound/voice embodies both the non-mundaniety and presence, as a perfect medium of the uninterrupted communication which entails the ‘bodiless body’: This simultaneity of the presence of the object (infinite iterability) and self-presence (proximity) requires the voice. The voice is the element of consciousness, the element of the self-presence of the acts of repetition, and it is the element which nevertheless does not have the form of mundaneity; it is the element of infinite iterability, of presence. The voice is the name of this element. The voice hears itself. (Lawlor 2002: 191) The “flesh and blood” of the woman exceed the narration, they are the medium of communication; materiality of the medium is the message. In the novel Drenje, the narrator also maintains Marshall McLuhan’s claim by saying that the “information is incorporeal, but the medium that transmits it is material” (Drenje: 106)43 . This is how the transmitted and recorded sound/voice, as a bodily, sensory singularity is supposed to be understood: [A]li glas bi, sasvim tih i slabašan, ipak ostajao na traci, bez obzira na to što u sobi nije uključen niti jedan radioaparat, bez obzira na to što u sobi nema nikoga. [...] glas je postojao, nalazio se na snimkama [...], komunicirao je s nama (Viljevo: 291) But the voice, though quiet and faint, would still be recorded on the tape, despite the fact that inside the room no radio was on and nobody was around [...] the voice existed, it was on the records [...] it communicated with us. A Derridian wordplay instead of a conclusion suggests that the atonement encloses this ‘us’ (“at one”) inside, but also a possibility of ‘a tone’ (as a homophonic double!),

43

“Informacija je bestjelesna, ali je medij kojim se transmitira materijalan”.

4 Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction

which is both tonal, and a-tonal, transmitted in an infinite circuit of the ‘postal system’.

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V What to Do With the Past? Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju Svaki čovek koji žvrlja po geografskoj karti oseća se kao Kolumbo, kao pustolov, vizionar i duhovni vlasnik jednog novog sveta. (Judita Šalgo)1   Prošlost nije što je bila (Olja Savičević Ivančević)2

Analysing the mythical narratives about Yugoslavia, Mitja Velikonja concludes that they “guarantee that the better past can be an indication of the better future and that the most important segment of every nostalgia is in fact a utopia, meaning a mythology of the better tomorrow” (Velikonja 2010: 146). In their novels Adio, kauboju (2010; Engl. Farewell, Cowboy, 2015) and Bernardijeva soba (Bernardi’s Room, 2011), the authors Olja Savičević Ivančević and Slobodan Tišma conceptualize utopian territories which do bear a ‘trace’ of the inaccessible past, but on the whole in fact enable overcoming of the ‘past narrative’. As in Judita Šalgo’s quote above, the protagonists in the two novels are ‘spiritual proprietors of their own new worlds’. While Savičević Ivančević writes a utopian reality of the new social imagination, Tišma conceptualizes an avant-gardist literary utopia. Furthermore, Savičević Ivančević offers a kind of a materialist analysis of the breakup of Yugoslavia, by, among other things, focusing on the socially underprivileged and marginalized, and framing the character of the ‘post-socialist working class’, whereas Tišma’s writing takes a stand on the capitalist society of the spectacle, hence drawing on the Neo-avant-gardist critique of society and culture.

1 2

Every person scrawling on a map feels like a Columbus, an adventurer, a visionary and the spiritual proprietor of a new world. (Šalgo 1997: 9) “The past isn’t what it was“ (Savičević Ivančević 2010:92; transl.: Savičević Ivančević 2015).

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In both novels, the affective and formative roles of the female family are narrativized by voicing at the same time the intellectual bounds with female/feminist literary predecessors. Nevertheless, the figures of fathers are associated with the Yugoslav past, acting at once as figures of nostalgia and ideology, and mirroring the narrative about the “absence and separation constitutive of the paternal function” (Kristeva 1997: 210). The split between “before” and “after”, between the past and the present pertains to personal and family histories. The Yugoslav past is referential in the way the chronotopic landscape is referential: “I spent my time mostly daydreaming about the past, remembering better times. For example: I drive my, i.e. my father’s phoenix-red ‘Bug’ down the Adriatic highway.” (Tišma 2011: 11)3 Unlike the solid imagery of the past, the present time is frail. That is how the same protagonist’s unreliable memories are not necessarily detrimental to remembering: “it is something more than the truth and shouldn’t be considered as something real, subject to the law of gravity” (ibid.: 75)4 . What used to be a factory is now a refuge for the addicts in Savičević Ivančević’s novel; the car wreck of a Mercedes – a reminder of the carefree youth adventures – is nowadays a shelter for the homeless protagonist in Tišma’s novel. Spaces of the present are ‘half-done’: their openness marks their futility. The unfinished graffito on the wall of the former factory marks the ambiguity of the post-industrial reality: Remiza se nalazi iza napuštenih hala bivše tvornice ribljih prerađevina, koju svi zovu tvornica sardina i koja već godinama uglavnom služi kao skvot dok ne dođe policija i ne izbaci skvotere, a onda služi kao još jedna kenjara i utočište za najbeznadnije među furežima. Na ulazu je grafit: LJUBAV PEČE TAKO KAO DA MI JE RAŠPA PREŠLA PREKO (nečitljivo). (Savičević Ivančević 2010: 193) The junction is behind the abandoned halls of the former fish processing factory, which everyone calls the Sardine Factory and which has served for years mainly as a squat – until the police come and throw the squatters out, and then it becomes yet another shit-house and refuge for the most desperate dope-heads. At the entrance there’s a half eligible graffito: LOVE HURTS LIKE a RASP RUNNING OVER... (Savičević Ivančević 2015)5 A Western-like fictionalization of the past in the novel Adio, kauboju effects a utopian image of the socialist Yugoslavia, a “not too long ago accomplished alternative, something that really existed” (Velikonja 2012: 164). The images of the Yugoslav past are not merely stylizations of a ‘better past’; they represent a historically existing 3 4 5

“Inače, vreme sam uglavnom provodio u uspomenama, u sećanjima na neka bolja vremena. Na primer: vozim se mojom, tj. očevom fenikscrvenom ‘bubom’, Jadranskom magistralom.” “to je i više od istine i ne treba na to gledati kao na nešto stvarno, što podleže zakonu gravitacije”. The original quote reads: “RASP RUNNING OVER MY (illegible)”.

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

alternative to the present-day reality. In the following pages the “impossible memories” (Tišma 2011: 7) will be set against history, that ultimately “material reality (a presence), [which] is shown to exist always within ‘textual’ boundaries [and], to this extent, is also ‘fictional’, also a set of ‘alternative worlds’” (Waugh, 1990: 106). These are the worlds drawn by the visionaries from the introductory quote.

V 1.

On the Real, Fictional and Female Cowboys Zbog tog su vražjeg idealizma vesterni i prdnuli u vražji čabar. Vrijeme ih je pregazilo.6   Kapetan, kauboj ili žena pop, toga nema [...]. “A Calamity Jane?!” povikala sam jarosno.7 (Olja Savičević Ivančević)

Olja Savičević Ivančević (b. 1974 in Split) is one of the most striking and most interesting authors of the post-Yugoslav literary and cultural scene. She regularly participates in regional literary festivals and book fairs, and her works are published and translated throughout the post-Yugoslav space, but also into English, German, French, Italian, Czech and many other languages. Together with the wide critical response and the literary prizes she received, the translations make the reception of her work quite comprehensive. At first publishing volumes of poetry – among other collections, the more recent Kućna pravila (House Rules, 2007) and Mamasafari (i ostale stvari) (Mamasafari and Other Things, 2012) – the author also published a short stories collection Nasmijati psa (To Make a Dog Laugh) in 2006.8 Savičević Ivančević in various capacities works for theatre (as playwright, songwriter, adapter). In 2017 she published the children book Šporki Špiro i Neposlušna Tonka (Messy Špiro and the Rebellious Tonka) in collaboration with the painter and illustrator Svjetlan Junaković.

6

7 8

“That’s why the damned idealism of westerns kicked the fucking bucket. Time trampled them.” (Savičević Ivančević 2010: 166. The in-text quotes are given in 2015 English translation, while the pagination is from the original edition. For clarity, from now on only the page numbers will be referenced.) “‘A captain, a cowboy or a woman priest, they don’t exist’ […]. ‘What about Calamity Jane?’ I yelled fiercely.” (98) While this collection was published anew in 2020, other published poetry works include: Bit će strašno kada ja porastem (It Will Be Tremendous When I Grow Up, 1988), Vječna djeca (Forever Children, 1993), Žensko pismo (Women’s Writing, 1999), Puzzlerojc (2006), Divlje i tvoje (Wild and Yours, 2020).

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In 2010 the author published her first novel Adio, kauboju, that, together with another 2010 novel Hotel Zagorje by Ivana Bodrožić, marks new moment in the post-Yugoslav feminist writing.9 Both of the novels narrativize the event of Yugoslav dissolution and its refractions inside the family: while Bodrožić focuses on the traumatic experience of war, Savičević Ivančević tells a story about the (better) past of the socialist Yugoslavia and its deteriorating reflections in the present time. The political transformations interpreted from an original perspective of the economic transition are followed alongside the narrator’s exposing of the patriarchal foundations of the community she has grew up in. Savičević Ivančević’s second novel Pjevač u noći (2016; Engl. Singer in the Night, 2019) continues the quest for the (Yugoslav) past by integrating both the accomplishments of the Yugoslav socialist modernization and the literary and cultural references into this post-Yugoslav feminist metafictional text.10 Nevertheless, I focus on the first novel for it opened up the theme of the interrelatedness of the Yugoslav break-up and the economic ‘transition’ marked by the social and economic insecurity, pauperization, deregulation and dubious privatization. Moreover, since this materialist literary imagination is fostered by a distinctive feminist narrativization, the novel Adio, kauboju embodies the literary conjunction interpreted and conceptualized in this analysis as a critical characteristic of the post-Yugoslav feminist writing: the Yugoslav past and the dissolution and their refraction by and inside the sex/gender issues. Corresponding to the common openings in the post-Yugoslav works of fiction remarked previously, Olja Savičević Ivančević’s novel Adio, kauboju begins with the report on the death: the protagonist and the narrator of the story Dada returns to her hometown where her mother and sister regularly visit the cemetery and “our grave” (10). While the reason for Dada to come back in the first place has been her sister’s invitation to come and help her nurse their mother whose health is deteriorating, Dada’s coming back and the story narrated thereon revolve around her effort to discover the motives behind her brother Danijel’s death; he had committed suicide a few years earlier. Dada’s following of the clues – pervaded by the anxiety and feeling of guilt – organizes the narrative as a type of a detective story, until, by the end, she learns the truth independently from her investigation. While this does not make her quest obsolete, it positively gives a picture of her search as a necessary step in her own maturation and emancipation – as a woman, a protagonist, and finally, an author. The destiny of Dada’s family belongs to the disintegration of a homeland Yugoslavia. Father died briefly before the war broke out, her brother committed suicide in its aftermath. The father’s biography corresponds to the lifespan of historical 9 10

Adio, kauboju had its theatrical adaptation in Split in 2012. I wrote about this in my 2018 article “Pjevač u noći kao postjugoslovenski hipertekst: šta rod, žanr i metafikcija imaju s ljubavlju?”

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

Yugoslavia: he stands for the unattainable reality of the Yugoslav past and disappears together with it: “Yet another of those hottest and longest summers in our lives – the last pre-war one. […] Our father died at the beginning of August.” (95)11 However, the metaphorization of the family relationships is effected alongside the conventions of the Western – a realm equally imaginary as that of Yugoslavia. Western movies imagery calls to mind the past of the 1960s and the 1970s, as the golden period of the genre, but also of the country Yugoslavia. By neatly employing the genre based on a conflict between the good and evil to contrast it to the reality of the Yugoslav wars, the narrator points out in which way the Yugoslav conflict was fabricated: “Niko se nije igrao ovih balkanskih ratova [...]. Jebiga, svi su htjeli bit Hrvati.” [...] “Zato smo se igrali kauboja i indijanaca.” “S prugašima.” “Protiv prugaša. Moraš imat neki sukob: kauboje i indijance.” (27) ‘No one played at these Balkan wars […]. Fuck it, they all wanted to be Croats.’ […] ‘That’s why we played cowboys and Indians.’ ‘With the outlanders.’ ‘Against the outlanders. You have to have some kind of conflict: cowboys and Indians.’ Conflict presented by the Western genre is, unlike the historical Yugoslav one, genuine in the sense of the cinematic or literary materialization of the high merits of justice and righteousness. Cowboys and Indians in this novel represent the universal conflict between the good and evil, which is why the designation “at the time of the wars” (182) in this novel takes on both the ironic and nostalgic sense of the Indians and cowboys fighting children’s game. Furthermore, cowboy movies embody the stability and prosperity of the post-Second World War Yugoslav society, which was largely organized around the products of the popular culture and its consumption. To that end, the symbolization of the cowboy movies – besides being a tool of structuring the fictional reality of the novel – communicates a meta-nostalgic relationship to the past of the socialist Yugoslavia. By conveying the past over the cinematic memories, the narrator is “mediating past” (Pogačar 2010), referring to a kind of a cultural reproduction of the society in the second Yugoslavia which “has been essentially intertwined with the production of moving images” (ibid.: 202). Indeed, Dada’s father “had learned everything he knew about the world beyond the Settlement from films” (96).12 On that account, a cult status of cowboy movies in Dada’s

11 12

“Još jedno najvruće i najduže ljeto u našim životima – zadnje prijeratno. [...] Početkom kolovoza umro je otac.” “Sve što je znao o svijetu izvan Naselja naučio je iz filmova”.

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family shows their double capacity to recall the past (in an act of the private nostalgia), and articulate the Yugoslav ideals (through a collective, politicized remembering). Hence, the family’s enthusiasm about the cowboy films reveals something more than a mere fact about a whole generation of Yugoslav consumers of popular culture devoted to the Western.

V 2.

Staging the Western. Why the Past Does Not Fit the Present?

A graffito once written on the wall at the seafront in Dada’s hometown: “STRANČE, OVDJE TE ZAKON NE ŠTITI” (STRANGER, THE LAW DOES NOT PROTECT YOU HERE; 89) illustrates the mediation of the past through Western imagery: the graffito, an homage to the genre, is the figure of the past. Since the seafront wall had been torn down and then rebuilt anew, the graffito does not technically exist any longer, but – as the narrator reasons – it is in fact still somewhere over there among the reconstructed stones, since it could not simply vanish. A recognizable Western slogan transformed inside the wall acts as the narrator’s definition of remembering the past: “memory is the present of all remembered events” (92)13 . This present is the point of departure for the storytelling, effected as the protagonist’s coming back to her hometown, that is at once also her return to the times past. Dada’s arrival bears a resemblance to the opening of a classical Western plot which “is the story of the lone stranger who rides into a troubled town and cleans it up, winning the respect of the townsfolk and the love of the schoolmarm” (Wright 1977: 32). This Western-like interpretation of Dada’s arrival is supported by the name she is called on the threshold of this different reality – her hometown which still bears traces of the past and the cowboys who inhabited it. The narrator in general engages in a complex regime of naming, which in effect offers clues to understanding her relationships with the other protagonists, but also her own multiple identifications. The neutral nickname given by her family – “That’s what I’m called – Dada, that’s the name my parents gave me” (11)14 – intentionally conceals Dada’s alternative selves. A marked, suggestive ‘calling by her name’ happens on the mentioned threshold, once Dada accidentally encounters an old acquaintance, oddball and outcast Marija Čarija, who addresses her as follows: ‘Ruzinava,’ rekao je netko ženskim glasom i uhvatio me za rame. [...] Na veselje putnika, ispruženim je prstima nekoliko puta kratko i isprekidano zalupala po otvorenim ustima i izvela stari poklič svog plemena sa željezničke pruge u znak pozdrava. [...] ‘Al ja znam tebe. O-o, znam te ja’. (48–49)

13 14

“sjećanje [je] sadašnjost svih zapamćenih događaja”. “Tako se ja zovem – Dada, to ime su mi dali roditelji.”

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

‘Rusty,’ said a female voice, grabbing me by a shoulder. […] To the delight of the passengers, she tapped her opened mouth with outstretched fingers briefly and jerkily several times, producing the old war cry of her tribe from the railway track by way of greeting. […] ‘But I knows you. Oh yes, I knows you.’ The encounter is structured by means of the motif of recognition (anagnorisis), that explicates the symbolic of the meeting, and not solely helps recall who the person is. This requisite of the Aristotelian theory of tragedy allows the narrator to cut across the constraints of the present-day reality and enter the realm of the cowboys and Indians games: the nickname Rusty (Ruzinava) points at a former, or the alternative ego of the narrator, and her ‘return’ to the respective reality, authorized precisely by her ‘code name’. Also, what Dada recognizes as her hometown is the Western landscape of the arid nature and poverty: “Between the road on one side and brambles, groundsel and unplastered houses on the other side of an imagined pavement, dust rose up, getting into your eyes and throat and between your toes in your sandals.” (10)15 Furthermore, the hero and the society are the most important elements of the Western narrative and the deterioration of their relationship generates the transformation of the Western as the genre. In the classical Western the hero “joins the society because of his strength and their weakness, [whereas] the vengeance hero leaves the society” (Wright 1977: 59) for the very same reasons.16 Likewise, the classical hero “enters his fight because of the values of the society, whereas the vengeance hero abandons his fight because of those same values” (ibid.). Dada’s search for the evidences around Danijel’s suicide imitates the structure of the vengeance plot (a type of retribution), but the main divergence from it is Dada’s perception of and by the society. The vengeance story resolves the conflict between the individual and the society “as the classical Western did – the two are compatible – whereas the transition theme resolves it [in the way that] the two are not compatible.” (Wright 1977: 164) Since Dada’s inadequacy as the protagonist – she does not fulfil the functions of actually fighting the villains (in this novel it is the society itself) and afterwards entering the society – her narrative is corresponding mostly to this ‘transition theme’. Unlike the classical Western, in the transition variation the society is “strong and bad” (ibid.: 87), comparable to the corrupt and criminal post-war society that Dada opposes to the better past, itself interrupted by the Yugoslav wars and a ‘problematic’ privatisation: “My sister says that we’ve 15 16

“Između ceste s jedne i kupine, kostriša i neožbukanih kuća s druge strane zamišljenog pločnika, podiže se prašina i ulazi u oči i grlo i među prste u sandalama.” Wright in his structural study of the Western offers the complete lists of functions for every Western “plot,” or “theme” as they historically appear (Wright 1979). Whereas a meticulous analysis drawing on these functions would also be possible, highlighting here only the basic functions and their transformations helps outline the author’s functionalization of the Western aspects in the novel.

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been robbed by our big-wigs and heroes.” (198)17 The dissolution of Yugoslavia is correlated with the criminal appropriation of the public wealth, introduced and legitimized by the new type of ideology at best illustrated in the anecdotes with the local tycoon as its main protagonist. While in the reality of the Western he would represent an anti-hero, the tycoon is the cowboy of today: Vrdovđek, da, da. Onaj što ima dućane?!” “Dućane i sve u Naselju. On je sad glavni đek” (68) ‘Vrdovđek, oh yes. The one with all the shops?’ ‘Shops, and everything in the Settelement. He’s the big shot now’. An appropriate scenery – the stage of the present-day Western – depicts in fact a decomposition of the cityscape: [Z]apadni dio grada […] iskričavi showroom, kričavi izlog jednog polupanog i pokradenog svijeta. […] marine u kojima su vezane ruske jahte veće od naših kuća i u hotelska naselja s rampama i čuvarom. […] Na istoku je industrijska zona. Istok je velika nasukana olupina. (22)   the west end of the town […] that scintillating showroom, that garish shop-window of a broken and robbed world. […] the marinas, where there are Russian yachts larger than our houses and to hotel complexes with ramps and caretaker. […] In the east is industrial zone. The east is a great stranded wreck. Hometown as Dada knew it barely appears beneath the fragmented imagery of the billboard adverts, iconographic representations of the clericalized, impoverished and criminalized post-war society in which Gotovina18 “larger than life” is quite literally the mythical hero: [P]okraj plakata pastoralnog centra na kojem piše Isus te voli, […] kraj Kuna.komerca i […] ispod ispranog Gotovine u natprirodnoj veličini […]; kraj novih zgrada za vojne invalide (12–13) a poster of a pastoral centre on which is written Jesus loves you, […] beside the discount store and […] beneath the larger-than-life-sized, washed-out poster of our very own ‘Hero not War Criminal’ General Gotovina […] beside the new buildings for disabled war veterans. The Western of the deprived and impoverished is therefore dubbed the “Eastern”, lending its name to the title of this first part of the novel dedicated to the Settlement 17 18

“Moja sestra kaže da su nas pokrali naše glavešine i heroji.” Ante Gotovina (1955), Operations Commander of the Croatian Forces in the 1995 Operation Storm (Oluja).

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

Dada grew up in. A ‘softer’ variation of the epochal political and cultural East-West division is – as a part of the Cold war, but also the Yugoslav dissolution narrative – evoked to suggest the ironic shift about the Eastern nowadays representing the ideals of the Western.19 Precisely the fact that this novel “doesn’t establish a direct intertextual or intermedial link with a concrete text, but rather with a Western genre” (Ryznar 2012: 171-172), explains the use of the Western as tools of a moral assessment, Western code representing a particular type of ethical values. What is more, since “the Western is the genre easily recognizable by its chronotope” (ibid.: 179), it plays a part in the ethical and nostalgic fashioning of a particular type of a chronotope of the Yugoslav past: Nakon predstave smo izlazili u noć punu zvijezda zabodenih u crnu košulju nebeskog šerifa, u višu pravdu iznad cjevastih i trbušastih tvorničkih hala i dimnjaka crveno-bijelih kao lolipop i gazili sag od cementne prašine koji se sterao do morske obale i dalje, daleko pod morem. (33) After the screening, we would come out into a night full of stars pricked into the black [shirt of the heavenly sheriff, into the higher justice]20 , above the tubular, pot-bellied factory halls and chimneys painted red and white like a lollipop, and tread over the carpet of cement dust that stretched to the edge of the sea and beyond, far below the sea. The past effortlessly acquires the features of the Western, that generates an integral image of the divine justice and human amity. The industry and nature are in harmony: the landscape absorbs the environmental and the social deficiencies of Yugoslav socialism, supported, plausibly, by the overreaching sense of justice. A

19

20

The narrator interiorizes some of the stereotypes about the people from the Balkans, simultaneously establishing a distance to outsiders. The arrival of foreign tourists is seen primarily as an ‘occupation’ and gentrification, but it is also communicated by the occidentalist conviction about the inability of foreigners to understand the local context. In the similar manner people living in the Balkans are “Balkanjeros” (85), and the Catholicism in the Balkans is a quite improbable and alien phenomenon (“perverzija na entu” [“perversion to the nth degree”; 112]). The alleged multiculturalism (that what is left of ‘brotherhood and unity’) is also mocked by construing a characteristic shared by different nations: “‘Ima ti tu raznih naroda, u našoj štradi u svakoj kući žive bar dva naroda, al sve ti je to ista kultura, šugava ako mene pitaš.’” (“‘There’s various nations here, at least two nations in every house in our street, but it’s all the same mangy culture, if you ask me’.”; 26). Humorously articulated self-stereotypes are periodically replaced by the pessimistic images: “pogledajte samo kakav potpun izostanak sjaja imamo ovdje, koja matirana noć puna puncata mraka” (“just take a look at the complete absence of radiance we have here, a mat night full to the brim with darkness”; 141). The section is omitted in the translation.

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strong affinity for the industrial features of the landscape is a token of the narrator’s interest in the past of the socialist Yugoslavia, a distinctive period of the industrial growth and the existence of the industrial working class. The skyline of her hometown suggests that the industry too is a (local) tradition: “The sun will have risen between the factory towers and the bell-tower and will be pouring burning honey over us.” (38)21 Yet, similarly to other Yugoslav traditions, it contradicts the present-day ‘world view,’ and for that very reason undergoes a persistent discursive and political delegitimization. Dada’s father, a great fan of cowboy movies, was a projectionist in the local cement factory’s cinema after falling ill due to the bad working conditions in the same factory. Being simultaneously a mention of Yugoslav developed socialism in which factories where spaces of cultural consumption and production, and a reminder of the hard working conditions in the (otherwise also empowering) self-managed Yugoslav industry, this feature of the father’s story exemplifies the utopianism of the ‘better past’, alongside its discrepancies and contradictions. The father was on the losing side of the violent Yugoslav dissolution and deindustrialization, which represent the basis for historicizing the antagonism between the Yugoslav past and the ‘ex-Yugoslav’ present. Nevertheless, this dynamic is communicated through the codex and the conventions of the Western: “I think the thing with my father and Westerns had some connection with a higher justice, with the question of honour” (125)22 . Undeniably, the question of law is central to the Western; it is “always related to the collective, social norm, authority, while the cowboy codex as a natural law of its kind, law of the individual and the voice of consciousness is on the opposite side” (Ryznar 2012: 176). The father’s and Danijel’s idealistic identification with the cowboys as unambiguous heroes, bearers of justice and dignity, is what locates their presence exclusively in the past. The lives of the two unusual men who conformed not only to the high ethical codex of the old-fashioned Western, but who also – as I will show next – opposed what is culturally constructed as masculine concur with the past, and their deaths mark the end of an epoch. Ironically, their defiance of the societal norms constructs their characters as fictional – they are seen as cowboys not only by the narrator, but also by the community. Danijel had been depicted as the cowboy in the prominent local graffito: To je crtež mladog i nasmijanog, pirgavog kauboja koji umjesto osedlane rasne kobile jaše starog zika, pedeset kubika, prema zalasku sunca. Ispod piše: “DANIJEL R.I.P. TAMO ODLAZE KAUBOJI”. (91)

21 22

“Sunce će se podići između tvorničkog tornja i zvonika i po nama izliti vreli svijetli med.” “Mislim da je to s vesternima kod mog starog imalo veze s nekom višom pravdom, s pitanjem časti”.

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

It’s a drawing of a young, smiling, freckled cowboy, riding, instead of a bareback thoroughbred mare, an old bike, 50 cc, towards the setting sun. Underneath it says: DANIEL R.I.P. THAT’S WHERE COWBOYS GO. Sharing their fathers’ idealism and sense of righteousness, Danijel found himself in the situation of being a lonesome outcast, which lent him an aura of a cowboy hero, but lead also to his tragic death. While Dada’s search unfolds along her suspicion that Danijel had an illicit homosexual affair with a local vet Karlo Šain, which should make the latter somehow accountable for what happened23 , Danijel’s narrative in reality assumes a heroic magnitude for transgressing the rigid and unjust social norms of the local community. Unlike the majority of his peers, Danijel did not excommunicate Šain for being an outsider (Šain is a newcomer to their place, a refined and peculiar to the taste of the locals, and a homosexual). On the contrary, they became best friends. The ‘rising action’ involves the peers blackmailing Danijel, a tragic misunderstanding between Šain and Danijel, and finally, Danijel’s death.24 Danijel appears as a true tragic hero – which could be an explanation of the title – fulfilling a cowboy’s code of honour, but not being able to fight the ‘strong and bad’ society. In his last letter to Karlo Šain – which in hindsight bears the weight of a death note – Danijel had written an ethical testament addressed at the true cowboys. By equalling sheriffs and partisans as those united in their moral and human ideals, the meaning of Danijel’s writing replicates the belief of the autoficitonal narrator who affirms that the past “isn’t what it was” (“prošlost nije što je bila”; 92). Reminder of the magnitude of the partisans’ anti-fascist struggle – another renounced tradition in the post-Yugoslav societies25 – the unity of partisans and cowboys also exposes the ‘merits’ of ‘heroes of our time’:

23

24

25

Dada finds clues, supported by the local rumours, which in fact bring her astray. For example, she sees by chance an amateur porn video she believes includes her brother Danijel. Though we eventually find out it was not authentic, this episode is part of the bigger puzzle of Dada’s thinking about the sexuality and its social legitimizing, her brother’s as well as her own. The intrigue begins as an act of peer bulling: Danijel’s peers assume he is a homosexual himself if he spends his time with the doctor. They blackmail him to give them the key to the vet’s house to “frighten” him a bit, or otherwise their suspicions would be confirmed. Danijel gives them the key; friends assault the doctor who shortly afterwards leaves the town. Danijel, torn by the feelings of guilt and tormented by the permanent humiliation of his companions commits suicide. The ‘tragic flaw’ of Danijel’s destiny is embodied in the fact that the emails in which he explained what really happened and which could have earned him the doctor’s forgiveness reached Karlo Šain too late. In the words of historian Dragan Markovina: “Considering the fact that the antifascist People’s Liberation War was constitutive to [Yugoslav] society, it is not a surprise that this topic is under the strongest revisionist attack, a process absolutely not burdened by the facts.” (Markovina 2017: 39)

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nije to ka onaj fensi šmensi bulevar zvijezda u hollywoodu selebritiji i te šeme. moje bi zvijezde bile ka šerifske značke i zvijezde partizanske u sazviježđima mogao bi ih dobit samo pravi lik da je hrabar i dobar čovo e to. visok širok dubok. u galaksijama neće svijetlit imena lopovčina koljača i zločinaca […]. njima nek daju zapišane ulice u njihovim jadnim državama di ljudi krepaju od alkohola gladi nasilja zaborava. […] neće bit velikih ni sitnih pasjih sinova u sustavima sunaca samo stari provjereni bozi, gaučosi i pravi kauboji među ljudima sjajni momci i curice dobit će sjajnu značku svemira. (159) it’s not like that fancy boulevard of the stars in Hollywood celebrities and alike. my stars would be like sheriffs badges and partisan stars in constellations the only people who cd get them wd be a true person if he was brave and good. high wide deep. in the galaxies there wont be the twinkling names of thieves murderers and criminals […]. let them be given shitty streets in their pathetic states where people die of alcohol hunger violence neglect. […] there wont be either big or small sons of bithces in the solar systems just old verified gods, gauchos and the true cowboys among us great lads and lasses will get the radiant badge of space. Clearly, Danijel expands the Western genre to fit not only the partisans, but also women, since the Western is – despite offering a strong identity matrix, owing in particular to its high ideals of justice and moral principles – the reality of men. Accordingly, Dada’s perception of the patriarchal and male privilege in the culture she grew up in sheds a different light on the otherwise praiseworthy Western morals. Being arguably another implication of the novel’s title, Dada’s saying ‘farewell to cowboys’ is her gender and feminist transgression of the cultural norms, but also norms of the popular culture, and their Western modification.

V 3.

Saint Fjoko Festival: Difference and the Carnevalization of Gender

A detail about the physical similarity of Dada, Danijel and their father – “He had this red hair and white skin. Like me and Daniel.” (29)26 – signals in fact their identification beyond the physical characteristics they share. They are the figures of otherness: while the father was “not quite like anyone else” (29)27 , the answer Dada offers to the question about her brother’s character is that he is “different” (199).28 Also, the father’s and Danijel’s difference multiplies, in effect being a comment on the metastatic development of the local identity politics: “Being just a 26 27 28

“Imao je ovu crvenu kosu i svjetliju put, kao ja. I Danijel.” “A bio je tu i moj otac, ničiji posve, drugačiji.” “‘Kakav je bio taj vaš brat?‘/ ‘Drugačiji.’”

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

little bit different was always an excellent reason for something to be destroyed.” (70)29 Father’s failure to join in an ethnonational group is one of the structural links among the family history and the Yugoslav wars, to which the ethnonational homogeneity was essential. It is the father’s story that reveals the link between the late Yugoslav nationalisms and war and a patriarchal and masculinist social matrix: “‘Our old man is an incredible loser’ [...]; war was just brewing and everyone had suddenly become nationally aware. ‘He’s always on the wrong side. First he was a Kraut, and now he’s a Montenegrin’.” (29)30 As the father was the member of the perishing and deprived working class, his narrative denotes also the social, class otherness. Furthermore, Danijel’s story is a recount on the sexual otherness, incorporated into Dada’s investigation as an ambiguous speculating about his sexual orientation, but also, as the beginning of her eventual identification with her brother, as well as the exposure of her own gender and sexuality exploration. The two male figures subvert the standards of cultural masculinity (and the masculine culture), representing instead an alternative masculinity. While Danijel verges on a non-sexual or also non-binary gender identity, the father does not fulfil the patriarchal demand to provide for the family, nor does he satisfy the male genealogy constitutive to patriarchy: “Mother says he was naïve […]. Naïve, that’s what they say when a man doesn’t earn enough to feed his family” (125); or: “He bore the surname of his long-dead mother, and whether his old man had been a Kraut, as people said, no one knew for sure.” (29).31 Danijel’s body is androgynous; physical similarity with a person in the amateur video drives Dada to assume it is him: “narrow tights of that second person, boy or girl, it’s hard to tell” (20)32 . While Danijel’s de-masculinized body would prompt Dada’s perception of her own body as a gendered body, on the other hand it is a statement about the nonfixity of gender and sexuality: besides the bodily fluidity, Danijel’s ‘queerness’ has been narrativized in fragments and hints, clearly maintaining the ambiguity about his, and sexuality in general. Moreover, othering is the structural element of the novel’s narrative. Constituting the other as the subject of their own discourse is the strategy of storytelling, effectuated as a hypertext of several first-person narrated stories. A direct first person talk ‘at the moment of speaking’ is a narrative device materializing the necessity of including the other and their difference in one’s own chronicle. Subject is “never the same and identical with his/her own self because it has been always already produced through the 29 30 31

32

“Biti bar malo drukčiji, oduvijek je bio odličan razlog da te razbiju.” “‘Naš stari je neviđeni luzer’ [...], taman se kuhao rat i svi su se na naglo nacionalno osvijestili. ‘Uvik je s krive srane. Prvo je bija Švabo, a sad Crnogorac.’” “‘Mama kaže da je bio jako naivan, možda zato‘ [...]. ‘Naivan, tako se kaže kad muškarac ne zarađuje dovoljno da prehrani obitelj‘”; “Nosio je prezime svoje davno pokojne matere, a to da mu je stari bio neki Švabo, pričalo se, ali se nije znalo pouzdano”. “uska bedra te druge osobe, mladića ili djevojke, to se ne vidi jasno”.

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relationship with the other, understood as the other language, other person, other culture etc. – but also the other sex” (Blagojević 2006: 48). Hence, the discourse of the novel is polyvalent: besides the first person narration, the story is a compound of several different discursive ‘flows’. They are all graphically distinct – graffiti, letters of the protagonists (besides Danijel’s, there are Šain’s letters, one written to Dada in the narrative time of the novel, and another which initiates her quest, addressed to Danijel earlier) and Dada’s notes. Danijel becomes a protagonist-narrator over his letters that are incorporated in Dada’s first-person narration. A vague image of Danijel assembled from the fragments of Dada’s memories and suspicious clues, is by means of his letters swapped with his immediate presence. Written in a form of a diary, his letter-confessions are at once independent lyrical pieces: as Danijel’s letters reach Karlo Šain too late, he in truth writes letters to no one, which is a fact prompting the introspection and an unlimited imagination, like in the contemplation about cosmic justice, partisans and cowgirls from the quote above that is applied as a poetic and effective closure of the first part of the novel. The marked discourse of Dada’s notes, mostly “analepses from the early childhood” (Mrdeža Antonina 2014: 242), sporadically appears in the main narration as a reflection on the chore themes – Danijels’ death, Dada’s gender breakthrough and the decay of the society. In the first one, she describes a childhood anecdote from the beach, when the father taught her to swim, while Danijel dived and deliberately stayed long under water. Though having happened in the times of a carefree childhood idyll, the episode carries an overtone of Danijel’s suicide. The fragment ends by a remark that Dada was left alone in the water while everybody was concerned only about Danijel: “They left me alone in the sea, for a moment, while they brought him out.” (41)33 A seemingly irrelevant comment “for a moment” hints at parents’ favouring of Danijel that in the context of his death resonates as a taboo, but the expression nevertheless indicates Dada’s internalized underprivileged status in their family. Similarly, the second analepsis is a filmic recollection of a light-hearted episode with the family sailing a boat, ending in Danijel’s spotting of the deer’s corps in the sea. A fragment about the local Saint Fjoko festival relates the events surrounding the local religious procession, whose carnivalesque features would destabilize the petrified structure of the patriarchal and male dominated traditions of their community. The procession is staged as a “grotesque symposium [which] does not have to respect hierarchical distinctions; it freely blends the profane and the sacred, the lower and the higher, the spiritual and the material” (Bakhtin 1984: 285–286) and serves as an ideal ambiance of Dada’s ‘gender insurgence’. The episode is composition-wise central, and it marks the threshold between the two periods: before and after the war, before and after father’s death. It also delineates Dada’s coming of 33

“ostavljaju me samu u moru dok ga iznose, na tren”.

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

age, associated to her revolt against patriarchy and the hierarchy involved in the religious ritual: Još jedno najvruće i najduže ljeto u našim životima – zadnje prijeratno. […] Početkom kolovoza umro je otac. U svemu, bilo je to ljeto posred kojeg se naše vrijeme prekinulo i zauvijek razlijepilo na prije i kasnije. Takvo je razlomljeno, raspršeno vrijeme postalo nemoguće sastaviti, pa čak i dovesti njegove dijelove u vezu, što neprekidno pokušavam. Usporedivo je možda samo sa životom u dva sasvim različita prostora, od kojih je jedan nestao, a u drugi se, kao u snu iz kojeg se ne budimo, dospijeva greškom. (95–96) Yet another one of those hottest and longest summers in our lives – the last pre-war one. […] Our father died at the beginning of August. It was the summer in the middle of which our time snapped and became forever unstuck, divided into before and after. It was impossible to put that broken, scattered time back together, or even connect its parts, which is what I keep trying to do. It’s comparable maybe only to living in the two completely different places, one had disappeared, and in the other, like in a dream we can’t wake up from, you arrive by mistake.34 The father’s death marks the collapse of the entire social order maintained by the very patriarchal authority: while Dada simply wanted to play a prank on the procession’s rules, it would turn out that the eve is the moment in which she recognises the male privilege that operates behind the apparently natural order of things. Hierarchy materializes not only spatially, but sensory: “fraternities, Fjokans […] process one after the other […]. After them come nuns and women from the Choir of St Lisa […]. Male aromas of incense and Pitralon spread around.” (96)35 Besides the imperative of men walking in front of women, a suggestive depiction of the air saturated with the male scents evidently suffocates Dada. Owing to his illness, the father was prevented from carrying the biggest candle in the procession as a sign of a particular honour, so the son – as the succeeding male head of the family – was supposed to be the legitimate father’s substitute in the procession. However, Dada comes up with the idea to trick Danijel and stand in for the father in the procession instead of Danijel. A kind of a fight over the throne (to which Dada as the female descendant has no right) is the effect of Dada’s sheer desire to amuse the ill father, acquiring along the way his recognition for succeeding in fooling everybody involved and ridiculing the codex of the ritual. Yet, Dada’s jest-masquerade started in fact earlier that morning when she decided to cut off her hair. Though not connected to her prank in a straight line, this expressive

34 35

The English translation of the last sentence is mine since it is omitted in the official English translation. “bratimi, fjokovci […] hodaju jedan za drugim […] Za njima, časne sestre i žene iz Zbora svete Lize […] Šire se muški mirisi tamjana i pitralona”.

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act of de-feminization “gave her the idea”: “I don’t think it had the slightest connection with what happened later. But it gave me the idea, I recall.” (97)36 The hair-cutting is a blunt performance of the crisis which could be read in a multiplicity of ways, attributable to the father’s death, the war, or a latent conflict with the brother. Nevertheless, all of these motifs coincide in Dada’s coming-of-age crisis, and intensify it: Tad sam još bila dječak, tek su mi sljedeće godine malo narasle sise. (Ostatak ljeta su curice iz odmarališta Crvenog križa zviždukale za mnom na ulici i to mi je koji put bilo drago, a koji put nije, sjećam se.) (97) I was still a boy in those days. It was only the following year that my boobs began to grow. (For the rest of the summer, the girls form the Red Cross holiday home would whistle after me in the street and sometimes I liked it, and sometimes I didn’t. The crisis develops as her body transforms and she wishes to remain in a genderneutral body, which is for her – the body of a boy. Yet, while clearly interiorizing the cultural conceptions of the female and male genders, Dada’s still tackles the possibility of gender vagueness (other girls took her for a boy). Already in the following passage Dada describes a moment in which she recognizes the sexual difference, and she starts playing with it: Stajala sam dugo ispred ogledala u Danijelovoj sobi u svečanoj odjeći Fjokovaca s kapuljačom na očima: viša sam od brata, ali ne puno, dovoljno – izmjerim. I slična kad ovako opustim ramena i stavim ruke. I kukove, primjetila sam. (97) I stood for a long time in front of the mirror in Daniel’s room in the Fjokans’ festive costume, with the hood over my eyes: I’m taller than my brother, but not much, enough – I calculate. And similar, if I drop my shoulders like this and arrange my arms. And my hips, I observed. The act of seeing herself in the mirror indicates the self-awareness: though similar to her brother, she separates from him through the situation of the sexual misrepresentation. This gesture is therefore a paradoxical identification with her brother and father, whose main characteristic is that they are different, and de-masculinized, and a separation from them, Dada’s distinction. The undertaking that should have verified the similarity of sister and brother in the first place ultimately affirms the difference, Dada’s femaleness. A type of a cross-dressing reasserts the difference, making her womanly body stand out. Moreover, the ‘gender episode’ is structured retrospectively, unwinding towards the origin of Dada’s ‘insurgence’, which had been also triggered in a type of a pretend play with her brother:

36

“mislim da nije imalo izravne veze s onim što se dogodilo kasnije. Ali dalo mi je ideju”.

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

“Ne možeš biti kapetan,” rekao je Dani jučer dok smo plovili na morskoj griži. On je držao veslo od palmine grane, ja plastično s gumenjaka. “Kapetanica!” vrisnula sam. “Ne razumiš, to ne postoji. Kapetan, kauboj, ili žena pop, toga nema,” slegnuo je ramenima. “Šta ću ti ja,” rekao je i nasmješio se […]; “A Calamity Jane?!” povikala sam jarosno. (98) ‘You can’t be the captain,’ Daniel said yesterday as we were sailing on the dysentery sea. He was holding a palm-branch oar, I had the plastic one from the blow-u boat. ‘Captainess!’ I shrieked. ‘You don’t get it, there is no such a thing. A captain, a cowboy or a woman priest, they don’t exist,’ he shrugged his shoulders. ‘What can I do,’ he said, smiling […]; ‘What about Calamity Jane?’ I yelled fiercely. Danijel’s routine observation in fact uncovered the purported universality and normality of the linguistic representation that in reality obliterates women (despite the possibility of their linguistic inscription and their already existing linguistic variety, at least in the Serbo-Croatian). Hence, it is plausible that the emblematic female and feminist ancestor Calamity Jane – who challenged the undisturbed male world of the Western – was the motivation figure for Dada’s carnival act. Then dressing up as a man was a stage in the process of the female characters’ expansion in the Western ‘dime novel’: “A much more promising means of effecting a real development in the heroine was the ancient device of introducing a woman disguised as a man, or wearing male attire” (Smith 1957: 126). Though in reality Dada’s scheme ended quite ingloriously – she dropped the candle, was slapped by her sister, and went unnoticed by the father whose health deteriorated that same evening and the ambulance took him to the hospital – it marks the beginning of her feminist rebellion. Despite “being aware of the ban” or – precisely because of it – Dada transgresses what is culturally expected and approved, and makes her plan work by locking her brother in the cellar room: “room was in the cellar, deep in the rocks, in the house’s subconscious. I was sorry for my brother and felt disobedient, but not afraid. The Fearless Rusty.” (98)37 Dada prevails over the prohibition the moment she identifies as Rusty, the female cowboy. At the same time, the fact that the “[c]entral episode of the attempt of a female/male transformation is located […] ‘deep in the house’s subconsciouses” (Mrdeža Antonina 2014: 241) enables the disentanglement of the family and gender roles inside the discourse of the psychoanalysis. Separation from and confrontation with the parents as the paragon of the coming of age parallels Dada’s gender constitution, and it is suggestive in this regard that the father dies without ‘authorizing’ her rebellion, and her maturation. However, Dada’s sexual constitution 37

“sobica je u podrumu, duboko u stijeni, u podsvijesti kuće. Žao mi je brata i osjećam zabranu, ali ne i strah. Neustrašiva Ruzinava.”

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is narrativized together with the awareness of the corporeality of her brother, as his body is seen as her alternative body: indeed, in this novel “[t]he relationship to body and sexuality – both male and female – is presented as mutable” (ibid.: 240).38 Her resilient androgynous body, a circumstance that maintains the identification with her brother, hampers Dada’s maturation. However, the immaturity indicates the brother’s androgynous body as the figure of the immaterial realm, strongly countered by Dada’s presence, her physicality: Te večeri sam ispod gaća otkrila jednu dlačicu. Jednu jedinu, al nije se dala iščupati. Bila sam skoro dječak, ista kao brat, koji je bio “kao curica,” rekle su tetke./ Netočno, jer Danijel je bio dječak onoliko koliko su dječaci slični drvenim anđelima […]. Oni su lišeni muških ili ženskih grešaka, jedina vedra, punokrvna bića (18) That evening I discovered a hair under my panties. One single hair, but I couldn’t pull it out. I was almost a boy, just like my brother, who was ‘like a little girl’ my aunts used to say./ That wasn’t right, though, because Daniel was a boy the way boys are like those carved wooden angles […]. They are free from either male or female sins, the only sunny, full-blooded creatures. A simile of an angel indicates Daniel’s genderless body, becoming an ethical metaphor of his conduct and the unmerited death, together with his otherworldly presence. The room as the subconscious is a depository of sexual cognizance, passed to Dada from her female predecessors: she discovers the first signs of her femaleness in this place that used to be the great grandma’s room. Femaleness becomes intelligible by incorporating the female family tradition quite physically into Dada’s self, for the evening Dada becomes a woman, the great grandma dies.

V 4.

The Body/House Trope: Essentialization and Emancipation

The great grandma (nona) is an invisible but present member of the female family commune, the foremother in the female family genealogy. The family house as “a 38

After the ‘generic’ narrator’s name Dada (a nickname given by her family), and a code name Ruzinava, one episode reveals Dada’s real name, indicating the equivalence of her and Danijel’s names, hence the conformity of their identities. Karlo Šain, the only character who might know something about Danijel’s death – a secret bond between the past and the present, between Dada and Danijel – asks for Dada on the phone: “molim vas, trebao bih Danijelu” (“please, I would like…to speak to Dada”; 73). He prompts the explicit and immediate identification of the two (though in the English translation her two names – Dada and Danijela – are not distinguished).

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

point where complicated issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationality intersect – spatially and temporally” (Holmgren Troy 1999: 12) is a stage on which a little female community interacts. Together with nona, the mother, the sister, Marijana Mateljan – at times bothersome but devoted affectionate cousin – and Dada herself are the fellows of this emblematic feminist sisterhood. Though her sister moved out when Dada came to live with the mother (Ma), she visits occasionally, acting like a feminist raisonneur, thus representing “a type of a protagonist’s alter-ego” (Mrdeža Antonina 2014: 245).39 While the ‘feminization of space’ – and the private sphere of home in particular – have been fairly critically addressed by the feminists as another essentializing discourse about the women, I would suggest that in the case of this female family the correlation with the realm of home/house is significant for forming Dada’s views on sexuality, her body and her political, feminist views. A critical argument about the home as “the metaphoric signifier of the femaleness” (Šeleva 1999: 130) in this context indicates the space of female communality as Dada’s identity matrix, effortlessly effecting the feminist dictum about the private being political. Also, this female commune is the space of the immediate sociability, not less important circumstance in the context of these women’s actual forceful relegation to the sphere of the private, exemplary to the ‘transition’ they live in. Ever since “1989, the demands of economic transformation in east Central Europe are serving to retrench women, displacing them from participation in the labour force and planting them squarely back in the family, their ‘primary sphere of responsibility’.” (Einhorn 1993: 5) Unlike the flawless past of the cowboys, the female family indicates the present time, de-mythologized and disillusioned. The ‘women’s time’ has not been an easy one: being also the time after Danijel’s death, it appears to be disfiguring in the repetitive daily routines, manifesting as a void, an emptied time: Ljeto 200X. došlo je prije vremena. [...] a onda bi se […] pješice uputile, jedna iza druge, uz magstralu do groblja. [...] Nakon što bi oprale našu grobnicu i odrezale trule stabljike cvijeća, spuštale su se do plaže (9–10) Summer 200940 came too early. […] they would set off on foot, one behind the other, along the main road to the cemetery […] After they had washed our grave and cut off the flowers, they would make their way down to the beach.

39

40

A picturesque figure illustrates this relationship: “Razmišljam kao da mi se ona uselila u glavu [...]. Možda je sestra u mojoj glavi kao Cymothoa exigua, parazit što mi ga je jednom pokazao veterinar Karlo Šain – pojede ribi jezik, pa joj, umjesto njega, zauvijek ostane u ustima.” (“I’m thinking as though she had settled in my head […]. Perhaps is my sister in my head like a Cymothoa exigua, a parasite that the vet Karlo Šain had once shown me – it eats a fish’s tongue and then stays in its mouth forever, in its place.” 102) In the original, the actual year is omitted: “200X”.

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Causing the anomaly in time – the summer came earlier – Danijel’s sweeping death regulates the everyday life too: after visiting the cemetery, the mother and the sister continue to the beach, which adds to the ambiance of absurdity both owing to the automatism of their doing, and the obviousness of the fissure between their lives and the outside everyday ordinariness. The idiomatic expression “our grave” – the family tomb – indicates that they themsleves are in a way also dead, while nature pulsates with life around them. However, though brother’s death is the topic of the novel, Dada returns to her hometown to attend their ill mother. The mother’s hopelessness and depression, narrativized by her static and monotonous routines (eating and watching TV, visiting regularly the cemetery) create the atmosphere in which Dada feels estranged, suggesting all together a kind of a painful separation from the mother. For, their connection is fundamental; the identification with the mother is indelible, allowing thereupon the inscription of the totality of their bodily bond: “It feels strange to touch Ma, I reflected. It was as though two skinless people were touching.” (117)41 The figure evokes the semiotic condition of being one with the mother, a topos of Kristevian creativity and femaleness imagery that helps grasp Dada’s conflicting feelings, but also opens the space of her upcoming headway as an author (and not merely the character in the novel). Analogous to the ‘mother’s narratives’ discussed in the Chapter III, Dada’s mother’s response to the difficult reality materializes as a detachment, a gradual vanishing from the story, conveyed by means of a fragmented narration and a minimal depiction. In contrast to the mother, however, the great grandmother – as the feminist ancestor of the family – is a striking character playing a key role in Dada’s female and feminist emancipation. Dada’s maturation does not only temporally coincide with nona’s death, but the onset of her female self-awareness occurs in a direct contact with the great grandma’s (dead) body. A few episodes with nona portray her as an openly sexual and bon-vivant person. In the family’s stories, she was even referred to as “Oblapornica” – “the insatiable one”. Hence, nona is the figure authorizing the mention and the discourse of the erotic and corporal. She encourages bodily love and a frivolous world-view both in word and deed, most of the time transgressing the limits of what is socially acceptable. Apparently clashing with the dominant societal dogmatism, particularly the way it regulates the behaviour of women, nona represents the attitudes of a profane feminist. Entirely turned towards life and its pleasures, she communicates the sense of entitlement over one’s own body as an essential emancipatory and joyous call, in reality a performance of her unconditional and explicit claim to jouissance, the “orgasmic overflowing of female pleasure” (M. Eagleton 1990: 205), “which is always already a transgression” (Kristeva 1997: 209). 41

“Čudno je dodirnuti Ma, pomislila sam. To je kao da se diraju dvije bez kože.”

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

Few episodes with nona in the focus effectively illustrate this sense of entitlement she passes to other female family members. The narrator’s vivid and carnal descriptions of her own sexual experiences apparently originate in nona’s dirty and blasphemous language: ‘Liker od roze,’ govorila je Velika Oblapornica. ‘Opalaga! To je za razgalit fine šjore. Nakon dva bićerina svaka se počne suknjama ladit. Dignu veštu više kolina i udri, ventiliraj. Cila štrada vonja na pizdu’ (69) ‘Rose liqueur’ the insatiable one used to say. ’Oops-a-daisy! That’ll warm those fine ladies up. Give ‘em a couple of glasses, they all starts cooling themselves with their skirts. They hauls their dresses up over their knees and airs themselves. The whole street’ll stink of cunt’. The extraordinary bodily presence of Dada’s great grandma has been strikingly shown in the description of the last few years of her life she spent blind and immobile in the dark and isolated room in the basement of the house, the same place Dada experienced her sexual maturation: U vremenu koje ne pamtim, bila je tu konoba s bačvama, pa kuhinjska ostava, tako da u sobi nema prozora. Samo uska vrata, uzak stol, golemi ormar, na njemu velika lutka Bebakojaplače […]. U toj katakombi u prizemlju, u udubini kuće, bespomično, živjela je materina nona, slijepa i nepokretna dijabetičarka. Pet godina u mraku, bez pokreta, pri punoj svijesti. (15) At a time I don’t remember, this was a cellar full of barrels, then it was used as a larder, so there are no windows in the room. Just a narrow door, a narrow table, a huge wardrobe with a huge Crying Baby Doll on top of it […] that catacomb on the ground floor, was where my mother’s gran had lived, motionless, a blind and immobile diabetic. Five years in the dark, without moving, entirely conscious. The great grandma is entirely represented by the spatiality of her room, and the house; her body, which expands onto the outer space, substitutes her sensory absence. The body/house trope (Punday 2003: 119), as a figure that embodies the interrelatedness or a contingency between the house (as the locus of home, family and the private sphere) and a female body, is here activated in its potent, creative capacity. Unlike “imagining female identity [which] depends on traditional patriarchy [and] literally locate[s] women within a domestic space” (ibid.), the point here is exactly the unexpected result of the traditional imagination. Literary tradition which reproduced the assumptions about ‘pure’ and ‘powerless’ women forged the notorious image of a woman as an “angel in the house,” yet effecting all at once its less preferred double. For, it is the space of the house that “explicitly claims to protect the ideal angel expected by conventional thinking, but also ends up hiding the

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‘monstrous’ female identity that is supressed by this thinking” (ibid.: 119). As Gilbert and Gubar have shown, it is a “duality or duplicity that necessitates the generation of such doubles as monster characters who shadow angelic authors and mad antiheroines who complicate the lives of sane heroines” (Gilbert and Gubar 2000: 80). Furthermore, since it is precisely the “sexual desire [that] rendered the Victorian heroine mad” (Coward 1997: 29), it becomes clear why nona occupies this function in the story. At the same time breaking sexual desires and taboos (the narrator’s denotation of the basement as the subconscious) and inhabiting the reverse side of the satisfactory femininity, the great grandma is – instead of a ‘mad woman in the attic’ – a ‘monster from the basement’. The antithetical femininity she embodies – a kind of the narrator’s/Dada’s authorial alter ego which incorporates the suppressed creativity and the sense of entitlement to authorship Gilbert and Gubar also theorized – is what in fact qualifies the authorship, becomes “a metaphor at the basis of authorship and reproduction of all sorts” (ibid.). The narrator’s/Dada’s upcoming confrontation with the ‘anxiety of authorship’ and her authorial outing is assisted by the great grandma. Nona is the figure of emancipation: Dada’s description of nona as “[o]ur underground doll from the attic” (17)42 might be another signal of the women’s liberation. Indicating Nora’s abandoning of her ‘doll’s house’, nona fuses the act of an emancipation from the middle-class institution of marriage, and the claim to authorship, a topic whose relevance would become more evident as the end of the story approaches. The room in the basement inhabited in different periods by the great grandma, then Danijel and in the time of the narration Dada, is designated as the space of the subconscious; it spurs a cognition of sexuality and desire, evoking also the dead, and the ghosts of the past. Dada and Danijel are the first to find the corpse of their great grandma: by looking under her nightgown, they break the taboo on the sexualized body, amplified by the taboo on the dead body, and expose nona’s genitalia: Sve na babi je bilo mrtvo već godinama […]. Jedino je živ bio muf među njezinim nogama, runjavo, blistavo krzno, svijetlocrno, koje se penjalo od polovice bedara do prepona i u tankom vretenu sve do pupka. ‘Je l’ majmun?’ pitala sam. ‘Mačka,’ kazao je Danijel iznenađeno i spustio spavaćicu. (18) Everything about Great-Granny had been dead for years already […]. The only thing alive was the muff between her legs, shaggy, shiny fur, bright black, that climbed from half-way up her tights to her groin and then in a narrow spindle up to her belly button.

42

“Naša podrumska lutka s tavana.”

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

‘Is that the monkey?’ I asked. ‘A cat’ said Daniel, surprised, covering her up with the nightdress. The recurring motif of a monkey relates to death. Possibly drawing on the Christian symbolism (base instincts, lust, devil), monkey also appears when the father dies, resurfacing finally in the epilogue to mark the complexes of “sexual orientation, Eros and Thanatos, inhibited eros and the authorship anxiety” (Mrdeža Antonina 2014: 249). In the eve of the father’s death, a monkey jumps out of the house, slips away into the crowd and finally hides under the skirt of a nun who played a part in the procession: “The monkey had crept where it was safest, among people, and vanished in the crowd under the wide skirt of one of the nuns” (99)43 . The erotic provokes the religious taboos and borders the event of death, that is instantly felt almost light-heartedly. Therefore, while Dada struggles to deal with the losses in her family and resolve the sexuality issues, the great grandmother ignores the reality of mortality. Though factually half-dead, living in a grave-like space, gran’s figure demonstrates precisely the opposite from the space that surrounds her, the already shown vitality and powerfulness coming from the joy of life, jouissance. Her jouissance is what counters both the death and the rigid and bigoted morality of the church and the society – both of which the great grandmother had ever since disputed and mocked. While openly criticizing the church and its moralism, for it is “pako na zemlji” [hell is on earth; 16], she herself becomes a saint in the canon of the carnal, a blasphemous angel: “There was nothing that ancient woman would rather talk about than love, with a lot of spice. The old lady’s youth became ever more unbridled, until in the end […] she was canonized as the insatiable one.” (15)44 Nona’s authority arises explicitly from her feminist re-appropriation of her body (as the sexual body), and is a gesture against the hierarchical opposition between the mind and the body, by means of which femininity is usually implicitly coded “with the unreason associated with the body” (Grosz 1994: 4). Nevertheless, the internalization of the house and an identification with it is a recurring motif in the story. In a variation of the body/house trope, feelings of belonging and security are expressed by clear distinctions mine/not-mine and an open/closed space as categories relating to the house/home. Dada’s body is the storage of thoughts and comfort; it is a refuge: Moja je soba kutija u kući kutiji. Iznad sobe je kupatilo, pa vlažne fleke probijaju kroz svježu boju na stropu. Krevet iza niskog ormara još je manja kutija. Sljedeća

43 44

“Majmun se uvukao na sigurno, među ljude, i nestao u gužvi pod širokom haljinom jedne od časnih sestara”. “Nije bilo ničega o čemu je ta prastara žena radije govorila nego o ljubavi, s puno začina. Babina mladost je […] postajala sve raspojasanija, dok naposljetku […] nije kanonizirana kao Oblapornica.”

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kutija sam, predvidljivo, ja. Najmanja kutija, kutijica, je moja pička. Prije nego što zaspim, pospremim kutije jednu u drugu, a onda u posljednju spremim sve o čemu mi je ugodno misliti, što me smiruje. Kao ulazak u praznu čistu kuhinju u kojoj prede frižider (19) My room is a box in a house of boxes. Above the room there’s a bathroom, so damp stains come through the fresh paint on the ceiling. The bed behind the low cupboard is a still smaller box. The next box is me. The smallest box, a boxlet, is my cunt. Before I go to sleep, I put each little box into the next, and then in the last one I put everything it’s agreeable to think about, everything that sooths me. Such as going into a clean empty kitchen, in which the fridge is purring. The sequences of boxes within boxes appear as layers of narrator’s bodily identity, further defined by the eroticized descriptions of her body sweating and the aroma between her legs in the subsequent description (page 20). The ‘boxes within boxes’ allude to the Matryoshka doll set and its female heritage symbolism, but also suggests the ‘plurality’ of female sexuality, or Dada as the woman “indefinitely other in herself” (Irigaray 1985: 28). These solitary bodily sensations correspond to depiction of Dada’s sexual experiences with former and present lovers, and form a part of this novel’s écriture féminine.45 The corporal and tangible language inscribes the erotic of bodies into the narration: “My hair slumbers between his tights wet with kisses, stuck to the thick hairs of groin” (123); and: “We produced the ineradicable strong, bitter smell of fresh milk” (46).46 However, the metaphor of a box as a closed and secretive space is not only a subconscious locus of sexual desires. Box is a trope objectified to reveal the mystery: materials related to Danijel’s death are enclosed in a case Karlo Šain gives to Dada by the end of the story. Among other Danijel’s possessions there is a floppy disk with Danijel’s emails to Šain, which only partially clarify the background of his suicide, but substitute for this lack of knowledge by Danijel’s reappearance, in the mentioned first person narration of his confessional letters. With this Dada’s mission ends, coinciding with the closure of the mother’s story: the night Dada opens the floppies and reads Danijel’s emails, the mother doesn’t come back home from a walk. As if the progression of her mental illness has caused her eventual physical disappearance: the mother wanders off, to be found by Dada on the slipway after a long desperate search, and eventually taken to the hospital by the ambulance. Dada’s decision to leave her hometown for good overlaps with the two stories and 45 46

Ryznar designates it as the “discourse fluid” (Ryznar 2012: 188); Mrdeža Antonina discusses the varying of “women’s genres” (Mrdeža Antonina 2014: 235–236). “Moja kosa drijema među stegnima mokrim od poljubaca, slijepljena s gustim dlačicama njegovih prepona”; “Proizvodili smo snažan gorki miris svježeg mlijeka, neoperiv.”

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

their ‘denouement’: mother’s hospitalization (Ma ‘withdraws’ from the story) and the discovered facts about Danijel’s death (he ‘reapers’ to tell his story). Opening the box with ‘Danijel’s truth’ effects a recurrence of Danijel’s death too, narratively resulting in mother’s final giving in to depression. When the sister and Dada visit Ma in the clinic, Dada remembers her grandaunt’s words: “‘When you open the door of a hospital, you open a Pandora’s box’” (150)47 . The opening of a box or boxes effects the definitive downfall of Dada’s family and her home: “Say your last goodbyes to your house, it will soon come under the hammer” (149).48 There is no affectionate ‘farewell to mother’, who immediately after the two visitors leave her room turns her back to the door. Nevertheless, her gesture is in contrast to her laconic, but light last words, as if in a support of Dada’s decision to leave: “Ajte” (“Off you go”; 151).

V 5.

Marija Čarija’s Western: Righteousness and Tragic Heroin

The second part of the novel entitled “Western” – with a verse from the British band The Stranglers “Whatever happened to the heroes?” as its subtitle – depicts making of the Western movie in Dada’s neighbourhood, the Old Settlement. The hero of their childhood, actor Ned Montgomery, comes to their hometown, and though appearing as a mythical hero in the imagination of the local fans, he represents what a hero would look like ‘down’ in reality: he is a disillusioned, cynical mediocre actor addicted to drinking and smoking. Similar to the tycoon Vrdovđek, Montgomery fits in the present time, failing to grasp the Western poetics of the deprived Settlement, saying: “I’ve been in Europe and Africa and Asia […] but I have never ever seen such a shitty suburb as this.” (172)49 His pessimism stands in a sharp contrast to the enthusiasm of the Settlement people, who, as they reason, would finally have the chance to participate in the making of the movie genre they prefer to reality: “For the first time in my life, something is happening in the Old Settlement: half the population is dressed in denim and gingham because of Montgomery’s film, everyone is involved.” (106)50 Yet, the locals are about to participate in staging of a ‘non-canonical’ Western, extradiegetically confirmed in the words of the narrator: “that would never happen in a real Western” (176)51 . Professional actors on the set resemble legendary Western actors physically, but the spirit of 47 48 49 50 51

“Kad jednom otvoriš vrata bolnice, otvori se njezina Pandorina kutija”. “Kaži kući zbogom, ona će na bubanj”. Since the fragment is in its entirety omitted in the English edition, the translation is mine. “bio sam po Evropi i Africi i Australiji […] ali nikad, nikad nisam vidio ovako usrano predgrađe”. “Prvi put otkako sam se rodila, nešto se u Starom Naselju događa: pola mjesta odjeveno je u traper i karirano zbog Montgomeryjeva filma, svi sudjeluju.” “ovo se nikad ne bi dogodilo u pravom vesternu”.

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the Western vanishes as they are about to stage an unfair showdown, against the cowboys’ code of honour: “The ones who look like good old Gary hit their mark infallibly, but they never, ever draw first.” (176)52 Therefore, the actors and the film shot in the Settlement represent the ‘professional plot’: “the heroes are now professional fighters […]. The members of society are […] simply irrelevant. The social values […] are things to be avoided, not goals to be won” (Wirght 1977: 86). While this deterioration of the Western reflects a deficiency Dada is aware of since her return (because social values ‘are the things to be avoided’), it also, as an ultimate violation of the only remaining sacred thing, represents a ‘last straw’ after which the stage of a Western will alter. The ill-treatment of the Western codex marks the launch of a real-life Western, which is as true to the Western roots, as it is original. Motivated by the Western ideals of honour and justice, the outcast who legitimized Dada’s re-entry into the reality of the Western – Marija Čarija – will stage her own movie, similar to Calamity Jane who has overcome a passive female role merely representing an “image of society” (Wirght 1977: 139) in the classical Western. This genre had been transforming precisely by representing women who stopped being a mere passivized element of a scenery, gradually taking action and ending up fighting equally with men. The Old Settlement version of Calamity Jane, Marija is a character who from her first appearance demarcates the Western zones of the narrative. She appeals to Dada’s overlooked childhood memories by calling her ‘code’ name Rusty (Ruzinava) and unfastens the fictional reality of Cowboys and Indians make believe children’s game, a part of the greater Western genre mythology of the past: “I heard, clearly, although from a distance, Maria’s furious female scream, the old war cry of the tribe from the railway line, tapping her lips with her palm: ‘Vava-va-va…’.” (137)53 Marija embodies a modern Western female character, “capable of strength and self-reliance” (Wright 1977: 166).She lives a life according to the rules of a fictional Western genre, stubbornly dwelling in the reality parallel to that ruled by the local tycoon and others who depreciate the reality of the Western. Her story is cinematic, told in sequences of the movie frames: she is as fictional as a character from a movie, performing her Western on the imagined stage, which would give her the chance to fulfil the demands of the (Western’s) higher justice. Furthermore, Marija Čarija appears as Dada’s ‘stuntwoman’, since Dada’s mission ended without her ever completing the vengeance motif. Marija is seen as irrational and mentally ill by the society, but the way the narrator portrays her qualifies her ‘madness’ as in fact Marija’s boycott of the bigoted local community. The fact that Marija does

52 53

“Ovi što sliče na starog dobrog Garyja nepogrešivo pogađaju, ali nikad, baš nikad ne potežu prvi.” “a onda sam čula, jasno, premda iz daljine, Marijin bijesni ženski krik , onaj stari ratni poklič plemena sa željezničke pruge: Va-va-va-va…” (italics added for emphasis).

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

not fit dominates the so-called insanity: like the father, Danijel and Dada, she is an outcast. Therefore, despite Marija’s eccentric appearance and behaviour54 , and obvious lack of capability, or desire to differentiate between the reality (of nonWestern) and the fiction (of the Western), her mission is not simply “grotesque” (Ryznar 2012: 184), nor in any way reflecting a “shallow morality and readiness to fight” (Mrdeža Antonina 2014: 248). I would suggest that the real reason for her symbolical banishment from the community (she is a weirdo, an outcast, a lunatic) rests in her acknowledgment of that community as ‘strong and bad’: she breaks the fundamental societal taboos by, in fact, challenging the sacredness of the ‘Homeland War’. Hence, without understanding the centrality of the Yugoslav wars thematic complex – as a part of the nostalgic Yugoslav narrative and its interruption – the Western genre analysis of this novel appears to be limiting. Paradoxically knowing something the ‘sane’ do not know, or do not want to know, Marija addresses what the community is unanimously silent about. Her knowledge appears as the ‘knowledge’ of an insane person, but importantly, it is material, it literally “leaks” from the ground, becoming an evidence of the war crimes. Her ‘mad woman’s talk’ is objectified and supported by the auctorial narration by which the human bones, remains of the people killed during the war are described as physical evidences of the recent history.55 Furthermore, Maria listens to what the victims have to say, fulfilling the ‘listener demand’ without which there is no testimony (Anderson 2006: 132); “the listener has to let these trauma fragments make their impact” (Felman and Laub 1992: 71): Osluhne kako se pod površinom tla giba podzemlje – dolje je sve po starom. Ispod zemlje vrvi od života i smrti [...]; u dubljim slojevima debeli bijeli crvi žvaću srca pokojnika [...], korijeni mandragore vrište, a mrtvi okupatori preslaguju svoje kosti. [...] Zato Marija osluhne i nikad dugo ne leži na zemlji. (183)

54

55

“Suknja joj je bila podignuta sve do grudi […]. Pramenovi kose su iščupani, primjetila sam, počupani do krvi [...] i u sljedećem kadru gledala sam s pločnika Čarijinu glavu licem prilijepljenu uz prozor busa. Lizala je staklo i smiješila se, vedro, bez neke zlobe.” (“Her skirt was tugged right up under her breasts […]. I noticed the locks of her hair had been pulled out, drawing blood. […] and in the next shot I saw from the pavement Čarija’s face pressed against the bus window. She was licking the glass and smiling, cheerily, without malice.” 49–50); italics added for emphasis. “djeca i berači šparoga katkad nađu isprane i oglodane kosti mrtvih životinja i ljudi, zaostale iz nekoliko proteklih ratova koji su kroz ovu tranzitnu luku povijesti i zemljopisa protutnjali nekako usputno, u prolazu – ostavljajući puno pustoši, čemera, prljavštine i histerije” (“children and asparagus pickers sometimes find the washed and gnawed bones of dead animals and people, left over from several earlier wars which had rumbled through this transitional port of history and geography, somehow incidentally, in passing – leaving behind a lot of waste, desolation, filth and hysteria”; 179180).

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She listens to the underground shifting beneath the surface of the soil – down there nothing has changed. Under the earth there is abundant life and death [...] in the deeper layers fat white worms munch the hearts of the dead [...] mandrake roots scream, while dead occupiers rearrange their bones. [...] That’s why Maria listens and never lies on the earth for long. Landscapes are more than a narrative scenery. They are imbued with life in the form of organisms living in the ground, but also as the dead bodies that indicate the real, pulsating, but concealed events of the recent past. Marija hears voices, not as the symptom of madness, but of the suppressed truth which needs to be revealed: ‘Pssst, listen, the dead occupiers is clattering their little bones under the earth,’ says Maria Čarija. […] All the pits and streams are full of the bones of the dead occupiers,’ says Maria.” (164)56 What is more, by becoming the protagonist of her own Western, Marija Čarija expands the narrative about the feminist emancipation, showing how she “becomes a real heroine, fighting with the hero and sharing his exile” (Wright 1977: 85). This ‘hero in exile’ in this novel is Danijel. Causing the reader’s undivided admiration, Marija is a fearless and uncompromising cowgirl ready to defend the weaker and combat the harassers. She is fond of children and animals, and, though she was a member of the enemy gang (the Iroquois brothers from the other side of the railroad), she was very fond of Danijel. Marija alone stayed by his side when his peers mentally and physically molested him, which eventually led to Danijel’s suicide. Hence, though her undertaking is depicted as her revenge for one of her favourite pet-chickens, shot by an accident on the film set57 , she does not simply exchange the human life for the life of a chicken as if in a mock-heroic. By subscribing to almost all of the functions of the vengeance variation, she in reality acts in revenge of Danijel, seeking at the same time the retaliation for wrong from the ‘strong and bad’ society. Announcing readiness to action by a recognizable Calamity Jane-like “va-vava” (171), “a ringing whoop, which was creditable in imitation if not in volume and force to that of a full-blown Comanche warrior” (Smith 1957: 133), Marija launches her – not parody, but – tragic travesty Western. Once she learns her pet-chicken is dead, a flashing film-like edited Marija Čarija’s Western unfolds, and she literary “breaks into the scene”. Again, over a landscape description that brings closer the social milieu Marija comes from, the readers are drawn into the cowboy movie of the present; the images of the poor and dry surroundings naturally fit the Western site:

56 57

“‘Pss, slušajte, mrtvi okupatori se pod zemljom kuckaju koščicama,’ govori Marija Čarija [...]. ‘Sve su jame i potoci pune kostiju mrtvih okupatora,’ govori Marija.” Mrdeža Antonina reminds of the motif in the Sam Peckinpah’s movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, when Billy the Kid finds amusement in killing the chickens (Mrdeža Antonina 2014: 248).

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

S tog mjesta pruža se čudesan pogled na kanal, more i Staro Naselje, ali i na obližnji kamenolom koji već godinama služi kao odlagalište otpada. Upravo tamo gdje kamenolom završava, počinju rasti čak i za ovaj kraj neobično ružna zdanja: to je Majurina, dača, ranč, leno i latifundija staroga prugaškog plemena rođaka braće Irokeza./ Žena koja udara nogom o trula vrata na ogradi i provaljuje u kadar je Marija. (173) From this spot, there is a magnificent view of the channel, the sea and the Old Settlement, but also of the nearby quarry that has served as a rubbish tip for years./ Just where the quarry ends is where there begin to rise up what are ugly buildings even for this part of the world: this is Majurina, the country estate, the ranch, tenure, small-holding of the old railway-track tribe – the relatives of the Iroquois Brothers./ The woman kicking the rotten gate in the fence and breaking into the scene is Maria. Marija is about to revenge not only for Danijel’s molest and death, but believably for the other innocent victims, killed in the war. A “softhearted Amazon” (Smith 1957: 132) pays back also for the cruelty she herself suffered being the victim of a violent father who battered her as a child. Her ‘furious female scream’ identifies her feminist rebellion: even as teenager, she would confront the father and return him in kind. Hence, similar to Calamity Jane, she “belongs to the group of heroines whom great wrongs have transformed into ruthless Amazon” (Smith 1957: 133). Marija takes a gun from the “average arsenal of a railway-track house” (175)58 , together with “sugar and potassium nitrate” she stumbles on in the cellar.59 Thenceforth, the immediacy of the moment is conveyed by the cinematic depiction and a shift in the narration, which turns from the first person to the second person plural narration: though originating in the vintage style epic narratives60 , I suggest that this narrative mask is also put to facilitate the immediate address to the collective. The narrator turns onwards in a gesture which suggests that the novel transposes the experience that is shared: by the narration’s alternation the readers are faced directly, a narrative ‘interpellation’ makes them participants, responsible members of the collective they belong to. 58 59

60

“Prosječan arsenal jedne prugaške kuće.” The chemical substance name triggers a flashback to Marija’s cousin Dujković who knew how to make homemade explosive, among his other petty criminal activities. As the war broke out a Serbian girl he was in love with was taken by her parents to Serbia. Though he would sometimes when drunk say “that he’d ‘make that little Serbian bitch pay’ when he found her” (“da će mu ‘ta srpska kurvica platit kad je nađe’”; 177) Dujković joins the Home Guard, to delibertely step on a landmine one day. The epizode inserted into Marija’s story supports the idea about the outcasts being the last bearers of honourableness. Ryznar defines this technique as the usage of the epic apostrophe as one of the “recognizable styleme of the oral epics” (Ryznar 2012: 195).

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Marija’s way to the movie set is awash in the flashback images of Danijel’s troubles and his peers’ cruelty. Therefore, though absent, Marija does ‘fight with the hero’ – Danijel – by representing his side and sharing his ethics, but also tragically the ‘exile,’ an excommunication, and finally death.61 Marija approaches the crew on the set and yelling directly to the camera – “Now you’re going to pay for your sins!” (186)62 – initiates the true Western gunfire. As if not understanding that the guns used on the set are not real, she shoots down an innocent ‘supporting character’ Anđelo 63 , but ends up being shot to death herself. Marija’s vengeance, a symbolic payback with the real consequences, finishes with the actual graphically marked “the end” as the closure to the movie, but yet not the novel. Lastly, all the characters explicitly identified as cowboys – Danijel, the father, Marija Čarija and Dada’s lover Anđelo – are dead or die by the end of the story. Dada’s survival qualifies her advancement into the heroine and author of the story, conditional also upon her saying ‘farewell to cowboys’.

V 6.

Migrant, Worker, Author: An Open End as the Beginning

In the final chapter of the novel entitled “Adio”, Dada departs from her hometown, symbolically and really rejecting its community: “the hero can no longer reconcile his status and values as an individual with the status of society” (Wright 1977: 164). Functioning as an appendix to the chore of the novel64 , Dada’s departure from her hometown is parting from the time and space of her hitherto life. She describes the railway station from which the train is about to leave as the last station, the “end of the journey,” though she was setting out to leave for Berlin to work, leaving behind her hometown, family and the past. The story began with her return, while the end functions as the journey in the opposite direction, and a beginning of a new story. Nevertheless, in this chapter the theme of writing is narrativized by protruding to the autofictional/extradiegetic layer of the story and resolving the theme of the (female, Dada’s) authorship. “Adio” is a “metanarrative epilogue in which Ruzinava

61

62 63

64

Marija Čarija’s character corresponds also to a classical epic hero characterization: she is a “warrior who lives and dies in the pursuit of honor” (Schein 1984: 58); she is “childlike,” “foolhardy and wrong-headed” (“Hero,” Encyclopaedia Britannica 2016). “‘Saćete platit za vaša nedjela!’” The character is Dada’s brief love affair; the title of the novel hence expands its meaning, referring also directly to Anđelo (as a kind of modern romantic cowboy vagabond, but also a background actor in the film they make). In the English translation of the novel, the last episode in the last part “Adio” is omitted, possibly owing to the sense of independence this part assumes in relation to the rest of the novel’s text. Otherwise, this leaving out of a portion of the original text is a symptom of a particular kind of reception which ‘mainstreams’ an atypical work of fiction so it fits the market.

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

makes a metaleptic transgression from the diegesis of her own fable and expands on the authorship of the novel” (Ryznar 2012: 197). Dada encounters a mysterious woman in the train, and though this situation cannot be unambiguously interpreted, the name and the description of the lady offer some clues: U kupeu je sjedila žena tamne kose i čitala novine […]. Poslije se moja saputnica predstavila: “Gospođa Nula, spisateljica”. Na sjedalu do nje je torba za laptop. Noge u crnim čizmama […]. Nije ugodnija od leša, pomislim […]; raskomotila se skinuvši crnu kožnu jaknicu […]. Izgleda tek nekoliko godina starija od mene, ali ima u 0 nečeg zbog čega bi i stariji od nje s tom ženom radije ostali na Vi. (195–196) There’s a woman with dark hair sitting in my compartment, reading a newspaper […]. Later my travelling companion introduces herself: ‘Mrs Nought, writer’. On the seat beside her there’s a bag for laptop […] black boots […]. She’s no more agreeable than a corpse, I reflect […]; she’s taken off her black leather jacket […]. She looks only few years older than me, but there’s something about Mrs 0 that would make even older people prefer to remain on formal terms with her. The name of the accidental companion – Nought – synonymous with nothing, correlates to other features of her persona. The dominating black colour of her looks (dark hair, black boots, black jacket), an impression she makes (“no more agreeable than a corpse”), intervals of Dada’s sleeping in her presence, and finally a direct mention of the death (“a corps”) suggest the imaginary character of the encounter, and a possibility that a mysterious lady is the death ‘in person’. However, the woman introduces herself as writer, is almost Dada’s age and seems to be interested in Dada’s writings. While Dada is briefly asleep, Mrs Nought disappears.65 She gets off at one of the stations, stealing the notes Dada had among her belongings, and only after waking up Dada realizes Mrs Nought has gone together with her writings: “she opened the suitcase, but didn’t take anything except that the notes I made for my stories were pulled out the pad. Few scattered pages were still on the floor.” (203)66 Importantly, Dada never complied or made some sense of her writings, in other words, they never come to be literary. Entirely supported by her name, Mrs Nought is clearly a villain character: the ambiguity of her figure, her appearance in the story and the themes she relates to suggest two likely interpretations, not necessarily exclusive. 65

66

“Ta osoba je isisala svu struju iz mene” (“This person sucked all the power out of me.” 202). Since this last part of the novel is not included in the English edition, the translations hereafter are mine. “otvarala je kufer, ali nije odnijela ništa osim mojih bilježaka za priče istrgnutih iz bloka. Na podu je još ležalo nekoliko razbacanih stranica”.

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As said, Mrs Nought’s attributes suggest that she might be a personified death, hence enabling Dada’s imaginary conversation with it. While they talk, it becomes clear that Dada is resolute to break away from the past, that is, detach from the history of dying which marked her story up to the moment. This telling encounter happens right after the gunfire took place and there is even more dead people than Dada as a protagonist is aware of, but her narrator persona knows this. Dada is finally at peace with herself, and since not being any longer guilt-ridden she answers to Mrs Nought’s cynical comment that there is a “good side of death” and that “death redeems” (201),67 that she doesn’t care about the good side of it whatsoever,68 expressing by this brief statement her final ‘Adio’ to the past. However, Mrs Nought represents also the second critical narrative complex of the novel: her physical resemblance to Dada and her occupation activate her aptitude to represent Dada’s authorial double, her writer’s alter-ego. Readers actually find out about Dada’s own writing only after she has a conversation with Mrs Nought, whose decisive function in discussing the matters of Dada’s (autofictional) authorship thus becomes apparent. Dada declares she writes “invented stories about true events” (199)69 , making an exemplary metafictional comment about the transposition of the lived experience into the world of literature. If Mrs Nought complete the stolen notes, or use them to plagiarize Dada’s work (what the act of stealing suggests), Dada would appear as a kind of a ghostwriter, while the authorship would be ascribed to Mrs Nought. This seemingly paradoxical situation – that the actual writer is a ghostwriter, while a ‘nobody’ is the declared author – points at a metafictional switch in which the author takes off the mask and brings up the issue of her own authorship. The authorial hesitation, a duality is constitutive to this issue: “The authorship controversy opens a space for the communication with the feminist literary criticism in the novel, that which deals with the questions of female creativity and socially conditioned fear of the audience, the so called ‘anxiety of authorship’, promoted by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar” (Mrdeža Antonina 2014: 249). Furthermore, Mrs Nought is a villain character Gilbert and Gubar theorized, a sort of a monster representing the other side of the female supressed authorship identity. While “Mrs Nought – the writer who hijacked the narrator’s function from the protagonist” (ibid.: 239) could indicate that “Ruzinava gives up the copyright to the novel as a whole, implicitly abandoning the right of authorship to the mysterious Mrs Nought” (Ryznar 2012: 197), in truth Dada continues to write. The main argument for such a claim is that even after the episode with Mrs Nought who has stolen Dada’s works, Dada’s notes reappear, typically dealing with

67 68 69

“Zaboravljate na dobru stranu smrti. Smrt iskupljuje”. Mrs Nought would also tell a tragic story about Peter Pan, yet less as a commemoration to Danijel, but rather in an attempt to provoke again Dada’s doubts and remorse. “Izmišljene priče o istinitim događajima.”

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

her major preoccupations: how to deal with the past (with the dead), sexuality and authorship. The last of Dada’s notes is a short episode about Dada’s encounter with Mrs Nought for the second time on the train station in Munich. This time, however, Dada decides to confront her and put an end to her intolerable behaviour. Importantly, Mrs Nought is depicted as a monkey, an ambiguous figure also related to the critical narrative themes. The monkey connects the protagonists in their liminal situations of dying, sexual maturation, and authorial disclosure. Here Dada takes the monkey, puts it in the pot that was standing next to the stand of a grandpa selling bagatelle on the train station, and sends it off with the departing train: “Eto ti na, satrape! kažem loncu. “Slobodno zadrži jebene priče,” kažem. “Ali se mene kloni.” Ubacim lonac u vlak koji je upravo polazio tko zna kamo. Aufiderzen. I ne dolazi skoro. (203) ‘There you are, satrap!’ I say to the pot ‘Feel free to keep the fucking stories,’ I say. ‘But stay away from me.’ I throw the pot inside the train which was about to leave who knows where. Auf Wiedersehen! And don’t come back soon. Dada’s closing of the imaginary pot is a signal of her successful shutting of the (Pandora’s) box, a gesture embodying her mastering of the past, and of her authorial competences. For, the appearance of Mrs Nought in the last chapter of the novel is particularly curious if we read the closure of the novel following the Western clue: when the protagonist leaves the society, “he takes a woman with him […]; the hero is accompanied in his self-imposed exile70 by a woman […]; the woman joins and supports the hero’s separation from civilization” (Wright 1977: 84). The hero and a woman as a couple of heroes could be related to Dada’s authorial completion, that is, her integrating of a diffident narrator, and the authorial alter-ego. Furthermore, during her ‘anxiety of authorship resolution’, Dada happens upon an old man in the narrative reality of the story: he in fact emerges as a character of her own storytelling, helping define Dada as the author: Neki deda zakićen krunicama i raspelom svira harmoniku i prodaje stare stvari, tranzistor, suvenire, ordenje, čakije, Titove i Tuđmanove slike, čuturice i lonce. On lupa u jedan lonac i viče: “Prazno vreme prazno odzvanja – prazan lonac dobro odzvanja!” I tako neprekidno. (203) An old man decked with rosaries and a crucifixion plays the accordion and sells old things, a transistor, souvenirs, medals, jack-knives, photos of Tito and Tuđ-

70

Italics added for emphasis.

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man, flasks and pots. He hits a pot and yells: ‘Hollow time reverberates hollowly – a hollow pot reverberates fine!’ Uninterruptedly. The old man’s offer of trifles is a fusion of disparate objects (i.e. pots and a radio), but also a mixture of different times and ideologies (Tito and Tuđman), corresponding to Dada’s sense of the present time as confusing and fragmented. The imagery suggesting that the present time is the garbage of the past is underscored by the old man’s shouting about the hollowness of time, intensified by his uninterrupted yelling. The present time is time without a real content, unlike the past; yet, the protagonist decides to leave both the present and the past: “I can take any of these trains and go in any direction. My suitcase rattles behind me, the most faithful dog.” (204)71 Dada is a passer-by, not attached to any fixed identity, and wandering: she is a cowboy hobo. Applying the typical Western closure with a cowboy riding into the sunset – “I’m done here and it’s time for me to ride off into the sunset” (194)72 , she categorically identifies with Danijel. The same way he is depicted in the commemorative graffito, Dada heads towards the sun, a symbolical designation of the future, an open end of the novel. Though the position of a migrant could be romanticised over the trope of a nomad, here it is narrativized affirmatively, regardless of its inherent disadvantage, for it is the moment when Dada becomes not only the protagonist, but the author of the story: her recently won authorial integrity grants a plausible happy end to the otherwise not necessarily idealistic outcome. The sense of openness is conveyed through the image of future and the way Dada envisages it, in sequences of filmic fragments that – quite like the Western movies imagery as an authentic narrative ambiance of her brother and father, or Marija Čarija – capture her life as a movie, with the two “carefree girls” as main protagonists: Tamo me čeka moja cimerica da zajedno pečemo tortilje, da nam noge nateknu od stajanja i pod nokte se zavuku vonjevi paprike, luka i ulja, ali možda – kad izađemo na ulice glasno i u složnom ritmu udarajući potpeticama čizmica – možda će se oko nas raširit grad beskrajan kao svijet, jedan od centara svemira, koji ne možemo prehodati za stotinu dana. Možda svi restorani i klubovi rade do jutra, možda će se vrata rastvarati kao na aerodromima i mi ćemo ulaziti bezbrižne kao cure s filma; u svim prostorima je toplo, svijetlo i prostrano, i ja ću možda zaboraviti ovo što ostavljam, samu sebe, ovaj šupak svijeta. (144)

71 72

“mogu sjesti u bilo koji od ovih vlakova i odvesti se u bilo kojem smjeru. Za mnom klopoće kufer, najvjernije pseto. Ja sam prolaznik. [...] imam sve što mi je potrebno.” “ja sam ovdje završila i vrijeme je da odjezdim u zalazak sunca”. Hereafter: 2015 translation.

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

My room-mate is waiting for me there for us to make tortillas together, for our legs to swell up with standing and the stench of paprika, onion and oil to get under our fingernails, but maybe – when we emerge into the street, stepping out loudly, our boots’ heels beating out a harmonized rhythm – maybe a city, infinite as the world, will spread out around us, one of the centres of the universe, which we wouldn’t be able to cross in a hundred days. Maybe all the restaurants and clubs keep going till morning, maybe their doors will fly open like at airports and we’ll go in, carefree as girls in a film; inside everywhere is warm, light and spacious, and maybe I’ll forget what I’m leaving, my own self, this ass-hole of the world. Contrary to the reasons she came back to her hometown, Dada’s departure has to do with the future, with her attempt to reinvent herself, yet by maintaining one possibility which is in fact behind all private and collective histories in the novel. The so-called economic transition transformed the Yugoslav economic model, and authorized the dubious privatization, de-industrialization and the impoverishment of the working class. Dada steadily favours and identifies with the traditions of working class people73 , while her Settlement as the ambiance, and her father as the protagonist are emblematic of both the economic decay in the present, and the Yugoslav heyday. Yet, the identification with her desolate neighbourhood and the outcast protagonists who have been inhabiting it ever since, grants Dada a possibility to recuperate for their defeat and try to write another story for them in the future. Dada’s optimistic imagining of her future as a prospect worker oddly fits Marx’s recognition of “the unemployed worker” who is “politically not visible and thus not subject to social and economic rights” (Kirn 2017: 149) of neither bourgeois nor socialist political economy. The portrayal of Dada and her friend earning their salary by doing a manual, instable and a low-paid job, one of the migrant-characteristic street food jobs, resembles “the rascal, swindler, beggar, the unemployed, the starving, wretched and criminal workingman” (Marx in Kirn 2017: 148). As an immigrant, Dada could probably be involved in an illegal work, but she foresees this situation of uncertainty and disadvantage favourably. The world to come is described as infinite (“the city infinite as the world”), open (the doors that open), it is “warm, bright and spacious”. This way of painting the future dramatically contrasts it to the symbolism of the home and past as the closed, narrow and shadowy spaces (the box/boxes, and the basement of the house as the critical narrative objects). 73

The picture of the group of locals picking cherries in the middle of dust coming from the local cement factory, in which Dada’s father worked together with the majority of men from their neighbourhood triggers pleasant memories. Imperfections are fused in an integrative feeling of belonging to a place and a way of life: “I remembered that dust as being like a soft carpet; it was an agreeable memory.” (“Sjećala sam se tog praha kao mekog tepiha, bilo je to ugodno pamćenje.” 12).

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Yet, besides the Settlement as the working class neighbourhood and Dada’s father as a cement factory worker himself, there is another ‘working class hero’ in the story: Ma used to work as a cook in the local hotel Ilirija. Hence, the connection to the mother involves also a social-class identification, which stresses the complexity of gender identification and asserts that “the gendered nature of work, space and time had been drastically altered by the new economic order, perhaps irrevocably” (Pine 2002: 96). Yet, while the nostalgic imagery is informed by the factually better past, the near future is imagined ‘nostalgically’ as an utopistic venture occupied by the new type of workers, the immigrant temporary workforce. To avoid the glamorizing of the underprivileged and vulnerable – though escalating – social class, this category must be linked to Dada’s ‘proletarian identification’ with Marija Čarija, Danijel, the father, the mother and other Settlers. This affinity opposes not only nationalistic, but also those ‘neoliberal transition’ narratives in the post-socialist ‘Post-Yugoslavia’, inferring a revolutionary solution to the problems of the working class the narrator so soundly represents. Dada visualises the situation after the hard work in the kitchen when she and her friend go out: “when we emerge into the street”, which is not purely a sign of the mentioned spatial and mental openness, but functions as a political phrase: ‘when we take to the streets’. The narrator’s enthusiasm could be justified by her ability to see the workers as the agents of change. Nevertheless, together with their potential role in changing the society, the narrator holds the workers responsible for their own powerlessness, linking this to their conforming to the anti-communist rhetoric of the late Yugoslav establishment that deligitimized the Yugoslav ideals and articulated the discourse of warfare. Ironically, precisely in the period of Yugoslavia the workers emerged as a relevant, if not dominant, political and economic force: Tamo na rivi od stakla i granita, dok jahte isplovljavaju iz luke, štrajkaju radnici koji se kunu da su srušili komunizam. Prorijeđene kose povezane su im u repove, neki imaju loše zube, svi imaju krupne šake i izgledaju mlađe od svojih žena. Sjede oko fontane, među pogaženim begonijama, indijanskim smokvama i pasjim govnima, puše york ili marlboro i govore kako ništa neće promijeniti u svoju korist (51) There, on the glass and granite quay, while the yachts sail out of the harbour, the workers who swear that they destroyed communism are on strike. Their thinning hair is tied in ponytails, some have bad teeth, all have large hands and look younger than their wives. They sit around the fountain, among the trampled

5 Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju

begonias, Indian figs and dog mess, smoking York or Marlboro and saying that nothing’s going to change that’ll do them any good.74 This portrayal provokes the critical revision of the better past ‘ideologeme’ and workers as its ‘relics’, highlighting “the failure of the self-management system to truly make the working class into social agents in charge of their own path” (Jelača et al. 2017b: 3).75 However, Dada’s departure from her hometown happens against the backdrop of workers’ protests, and though the police soon disperses the protesters, as if a revolutionary spark has been already instigated, and articulated expressively in Marxian rhetoric: “Soon the strikers withdraw, still carrying their placards at half-mast. Some have stuck theirs in rubbish bins. […] When they are hungry enough, they’ll take up arms, then people will take notice.” (198)76 Therefore, though defeated (they “withdrew,” carrying the signs “half-mast”) and disillusioned, the workers are seen as eventually waging their class war. The ‘post-socialist transition’, legitimized by the anti-socialist (hence also antiYugoslav) discourse, becomes a more and more relevant theme in the post-Yugoslav literary field. Moreover, it seems that women’s writing in particular is engaged in disseminating the theme of the economic and social transformations: “when we discuss the contemporary fiction from Croatia we inevitably discuss gender. And when we discuss issues of gender, we’ve begun discussing labour” (Postnikov 2016). Though Postnikov refers only to Croatian contemporary production, it is a comprehensive post-Yugoslav literary phenomenon. A type of the ‘feminization’ or ‘gendering’ of the socio-economic and labour topics in literature advances the argument about the capacity of feminist writing and reading of literature. The unitary model of seeing gender/sex and class as undivided, allows taking hold of the various ‘categories of difference’ or ‘categories of inequality’, which in return broadens and differentiates the spaces of the literary imagination: [T]he new ‘female wave’ finally integrates the experiences of the workers’ insecurity, material disadvantage and uncertainty into the re-coded social reality. Most commonly, the economic dimension of everyday life is intertwined with the intimate – that which is vibrantly erotic, pulsating with love, or tiresome routine, 74 75

76

The important nuance in the original is that the workers themselves won’t change anything to their benefit, in their favour. Yet, a minor detail – the description of workers smoking Marlboro cigarettes – evokes the classical image of a cowboy from the Marlboro campaign which exploited the Western imagery to promote its product; though possibly irrelevant, it could still point, at least latently, to a Western hero, further justified by the narrator’s final optimistic envisioning of the workers’ prospects. “uskoro su se štrajkači povukli i dalje noseći transparente na pola koplja. Neki su svoje parole zaboli u kante za smeće [...]. Kad budu dovoljno gladni, uzet će oružje, onda ih više neće moći ignorirati.”

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making this dimension now ‘normalized’: it is not any longer displaced into the dystopian future, nor does it count on the offensive introduction of the workerprotagonist; it is simply a huge, important, ever-present segment of the ‘normal life’; […] we [can] describe it as a kind of a ‘normalization’ of the labour experience by its integration into the private, intimate sphere of life. (Postnikov 2016) Despite the troubling association of women’s writing and the ‘intimate’ and ‘private’ narratives, this account evidences how women’s writing, as well as feminist writing integrates the ‘economic dimension’ into the fictional reality as its genuine ambiance, and not solely as some kind of a programmatic statement. The aforementioned unitary approach allowed for the writing as analysis, and not a mere description: the conception of literary reality in the novel Adio, kauboju embodies the utopistic social imagination and reintroduces the materialist reading of history by relying upon the traditions of feminist writing, rearticulating “the feminist utopian horizon” (Malenica 2019: 54).

VI What to Do With the Past? Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba Da sam počeo da se oblačim kao žena i da izgledam kao žena, utisak koji bi ostavio govor u ženskom rodu bio bi mnogo slabiji, izazivao bi manji šok, pošto bi ženskim izgledom već najavljivao taj ženski nastup, govor u ženskom rodu.1   Nema polova, ja sam žena žene, svi muškarci su žene a žene su samo žene! [...] Iz inata, odlučio sam da ubuduće govorim u ženskom rodu. Nije me uopšte bilo sramota. 2 (Slobodan Tišma)

An alternative answer to the question ‘what to do with the past?’ could be found in Slobodan Tišma’s novel Bernardijeva soba (Bernardi’s Room). Though – like in the Adio, kauboju story – a necessary transformation takes place only after the protagonist ‘travels back’ to the past, the point is to go beyond the ‘commemoration’ of the past. Despite the gratifying nostalgic images the past has offered to the solitary protagonist, he finds a ‘way out’ of it by reflecting a type of a ‘historical experience’, as opposed to that of the commemoration. The past turns out to be the “past in its presence, not in its pastness” (Buden 2017: 345). Hence, the historical experience of 1

2

If I started wearing women’s clothes and tried to look as a woman, the impression left by my speaking in the feminine gender would be diminished; it wouldn’t be so shocking, since feminine looks would have already suggested the female performance, the feminine gender in speech. (Tišma 2012: 32. For legibility the novel will be henceforth referenced only by the page numbers.) There are no sexes, I am a woman’s woman, all men are women and women are simply women. Out of spite I decided to speak about myself from the female perspective in the future, by using the feminine grammatical forms. I was not the slightest bit ashamed. (31)

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the late Yugoslav arts, the Neo-avant-garde together with the historical and artistic utopias of the time are that “performatively address[ed] historical praxis” (Buden 2017: 348), which – while also making the protagonist’s ‘private’ desire of becoming a woman’s woman happen – introduces a critical connection between the late Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literatures. Slobodan Tišma (b. 1946 in Stara Pazova) has been one of the most curious artists of the Novi Sad Yugoslav scene from the early 1960s until today. Combining music, poetry practice, performances, street actions and visual arts, his presence in the cultural scene has been until recently broadly recognized mostly by his two cult bands La strada and Luna, which existed with interruptions from 1979 to 1989. He returned to the scene with the collections of poetry,3 after which he wrote a book of essays Blues Diary in 2001, and finally published the first book of what some consider a Novi Sad trilogy, the collection of stories Urvidek in 2005. In 2009 he published his first novel Quattro stagioni (Biljana Jovanović award in 2010) and finally Bernardijeva soba in 2011. In 2019 the third novel Grozota ili… (Horror or…) appeared. Slobodan Tišma’s second novel Bernardijeva soba won the biggest literary prize for the best novel in Serbian language, the NIN award, in 2012. A part of the jury’s explication refers to Tišma’s possible literary influences, and is mostly absorbed by the general accounts on the opposition between the individual and a society represented by the story about an artist.4 Yet, a truly significant moment of this awarding is the ‘admittance’ of the work and the author occupying the cultural margins into the cultural centre, for this gesture in fact mainstreamed some of the essential aspects of the post-Yugoslav literature. These are not only those from the mainstream absent topics of the Yugoslav past and the war, but also the late Yugoslav artistic and literary traditions this novel calls into play and makes them an integral aspect of the story. This also proved once again that the “most influential representative of the group KôD Slobodan Tišma [established] one of the most challenging poetic concepts which, with its public and ‘underground’ impact, has lasted until today” (Kopicl 2003: 103–104). At the same time an homage to the Yugoslav Neo-avant-garde scene of the 1960s and 1970s, Tišma himself had been a part of, and an ironic take on any attempt of canonization, this novel produces a peculiar mixture of nostalgia and an unsentimental ‘cracking’ of a finite narrative, identity or even history. I intend to show what makes Tišma’s Bernardi’s Room – embedded in the avant-gardist artistic and

3 4

Marinizmi (Marinisms, 1995), Vrt kao to (Garden as It, 1997). The jury listed Kafka, Hamsun, Bernhard and early Crnjanski among the influences and underlined the perspective of “human isolation and the artist’s self-sufficiency”, as well as the “silent renaissance which offers a glimmer of hope to readers” (more at: https://www. danas.rs/kultura/oda-suvisnom-coveku/ [8.3.2015]).

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

theoretical traditions from Benjamin to Situationist International, and referencing the works of the Yugoslav Neo-avant-gardists, from his own to that of Judita Šalgo’s – epochal. Tišma’s present-day writings go with the concepts and discourses of the post-avant-garde that has included the “analytical, critical, parodic, and simulative strategies for finishing, for criticism, and for second-degree (meta-)use of modernist and avant-garde art and culture” (Šuvaković 2003: 3). Also, following the feminist inscriptions which range from the narrator’s decision to change his sex, to his admittance in the female commune by the end of the novel, I shall locate this novel inside post-Yugoslav feminist literary discourse, and present its relationship to Yugoslav Neo-avant-gardist literature. The story of the novel begins with the protagonist Pišta Petrović – a type of an antihero residing on the margins of the society – entering a car wreck he finds in a parking lot, and that soon after becomes his home. Pišta comes to be homeless after an attempt to live in a male commune with his friends and acquaintances had failed, that is, after they were all together evicted from the flat. Yet, this homelessness is informed by an ironized coming of age narrative: in his late thirties, the protagonist relives the separation anxiety, for he only now leaves the family flat his parents had successively left earlier in the past. Yet, Pišta spends time in a Mercedes car wreck daydreaming about the past, but also being haunted by a car accident from his youth, when a young woman he had raced with died. The memory grows more complicated as he can’t tell with all certainty if a young woman died or not, since it appears that instead of one there were two different, but very similar women driving the same (type of) car. And while the car wreck activates the discourses of both home and past, there is another object of narration and fantasies – Bernardi’s room, the eponymic designer furniture set. It is a Yugoslav modernist design set, Pišta’s parents’ mid-sixties purchase, a souvenir of the middle-class Yugoslav family’s economic growth. Hence, it associates both the family life, and the aesthetic discourse of the post Second World War Yugoslav avant-gardist design and arts. By the end of the novel the events accelerate. The denouement begins with Pišta’s selling off of the precious furniture set, when his mother returns to help him go out of the prison he ended up in, and takes him with her to a remote female commune. Yet, this ‘epic’ dynamics in the end is juxtaposed to the developments in the first part of the novel. Pišta Petrović lives an inner life. The readers barely have access to the outside reality, there are almost no descriptions of the exterior or of the everyday life. Pišta is a loner, he doesn’t belong, resembling the narrator in Savičević Ivančević novel: [U] periodu kada sam propagirao “ideju ludila”, bio sam prilično usamljen. […]Plašio sam se samoće (27) [in the period when I propagated the “idea of insanity” I was pretty lonesome. […] I was afraid of loneliness];

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Strah da bih mogao ostati sam je bio osnovni razlog što sam primio u stan sve te ljude. (41) [Fear of being alone was the main reason to admit all these people into my flat.];   Sam pod zvezdama pred Okeanom. (56) [Alone under the stars and in front of the Ocean.];   Nisam imao nikakve sigurnosti, nikakvog oslonca. (90) [There was no certainty, no support.];   Tata će umreti, ostaću sam, užasno se plašim da budem sam, mama! (25). [Dad will die, I’ll stay alone, I’m terribly afraid of being alone, mummy!]. His immersion into the fantasized past occurs against the reduced ‘reality’. In contrast, the descriptions of his daily routines are detailed and the interiors are carefully chronicled. In part narrativized as characteristic of a neurotic personality – which is the narrator’s own diagnosis – this aspect of the story introduces the psychoanalytical discourse as the meta-discourse of the narrator’s ambiguous and comical interpretation of the events in the novel. Part of this ironic play is the autofictional narrator’s indication of the Lacanian psychoanalytical schemes, but also eventually, its post-structuralist feminist revision, well summed up in Terry Eagleton’s critique of the Lacanian concept of the symbolic order: [T]he symbolic order of which Lacan writes is in reality the patriarchal sexual and social order of modern class-society, structured around the ‘transcendental signifier’ of the phallus, dominated by the Law which the father embodies. There is no way, then in which a feminist or pro-feminist may uncritically celebrate the symbolic order at the expense of the imaginary: on the contrary, the oppressiveness of the actual social and sexual relations of such a system is precisely the target of the feminist critique. (T. Eagleton 1990: 214) In Olja Savičević Ivančević’s novel the body and its sexualisation, along the processes of maturation and sexual distinction have been rooted in the images and metaphors of the family house, its capacity to contain family histories and the feeling of belonging. Though not an unambiguous relationship – it offers both the feeling of belonging and estrangement – home is constitutive to her bodily and gender identity (especially the alter-ego figure of the brother Daniel and the female matriarch, the great grandma). The family home and the body are also in the focus of Tišma’s narrator, but associated in the mode which enables their de-essentilization. The novel Bernardijeva soba is largely the story about ‘occupying’, inhabiting and appropriating spaces – of body and home – rather than merely ‘inheriting’ them, and complying with what we were ‘born into’.

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

VI 1.

Objects of the Past, Past of the Objects: Past as Belonging(s)

Both objects – the furniture set Bernardi’s room, a remnant from the family past, and the Mercedes car wreck in which Pišta finds his home are the loci of introspection and memories, materializing as Derridian traces: “Trace as memory is not a pure breaching that might be reappropriated at any time as simple presence; it is rather the ungraspable and invisible difference between breaches.” (Derrida 2005: 253). Protagonist will search for those breaches precisely inside the two ‘objects of the past’, and what he finds in this in-between space would decide not only the status of the past, but would effectuate his bodily and sexual ‘difference’. The first word of the novel – “body” – is immediately followed by the “armour” establishing a connection among the car body shell and the protagonist’s (human) body. The two bodies that have been instantly coupled present their aptitude to ‘surround’ something, or ‘someone’: “Armour around what?” (7).5 Also, the car parts that are missing, described as the human organs,6 are in reality substituted by the protagonist’s own body. Pišta wonders what could have happened to the owner of the Mercedes car wreck, reasoning that he either died or forgot where he had parked his car: “The car is left on the parking lot, forgotten. The owner maybe died, or just can’t remember where he had left his car.” (Ibid.)7 Though linked to the past as the realm of forgetting and the dead, the wreck involves a presence; it is a space of ‘impossible remembering’. Pišta is fascinated with the history of the mysterious car wreck he has no means to recover, unless he surrenders to Proustian sensory presence of the past (the madeleine-effect is here the odour): “Purple-blue colour opens the small box containing the scents which awake the impossible memories.” (Ibid.)8 A young woman Pišta had raced with had also driven the Mercedes, making him think that the car wreck could be the very Mercedes the girl drove in a bygone race. Also, this complicates the situation of the owner’s gender: was it a man or maybe yet a woman? Still, though the verity of the event is not explicit, what is more, it is not certain if the race together with the accident happened in the first place,

5 6

7 8

“Oklop čega?” “Redom, sitniji, lakši delovi, retrovizori, farovi, ručica menjača, šoferšajbna, zatim sedišta presvučena kožom i na kraju je izvađen i sam motor, zapravo, prvo karburator, pa onda motor. Srce. Brzo je to išlo. U džungli telo se brzo pokvari, počne da se raspada, da zaudara.” (One by one, smaller, lighter parts, the rear-view mirrors, the headlights, the gear stick, the windshield, then the leather seats and in the end the engine was out, actually, first the carburetor and then the engine. The heart. It went fast. The body rottens fast in the jungle, it starts dissolving and smelling. 7). “Automobil ostavljen na parkingu, zaboravljen. Možda je vlasnik umro, ili samo ne može da seti gde je parkirao svoj auto.” “Ljubičastoplava boja otvara kutijicu sa mirisima koji bude nemoguća sećanja.”

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the unreliability of memories is not necessarily detrimental to remembering: “it is something more than the truth and shouldn’t be considered a real thing, subject to the law of gravity” (75)9 . The wreck, the remains of the past, even a possibility of some uncertain past are more valuable than the great Ocean itself, an essential narrative metaphor representing both the unknown and the aesthetic and physical jouissance, an utmost experience of the protagonist (it also bears associations to the ever absent mother, and the city as the spatial ambiance of the protagonist): Ledeni Okean, surovi kosmos kao jedina istina. Ipak, kao da se smlačio poslednjih godina, postao nedefinisan, ni leden, ni vreo. Ali ova olupina je za mene predstavljala nešto mnogo više. I to je bilo izbavljujuće. Postojala je fascinacija njenom istorijom, njenim slučajem (74–75) Ice-cold Ocean, cruel cosmos as the only truth. However, it’s as if it got warmer in last few years, became undefined, neither cold nor hot. But this wreck was much more for me. And that was redeeming. I was fascinated by its history, its case. The aesthetics of the Ocean is contrasted to ephemeral human existence. It is the secret source of inspiration and imagination. Yet, this transcendent realm, preserving a romantic, metaphysical ‘essence,’ is persistently tested by a Derridian frolic, which makes every presence ambiguous, different from ‘itself’: “The enigma of presence ‘pure and simple’: as duplication, original, repetition, auto-affection, and différance.” (Derrida 2005: 247). Derrida’s critique of the metaphysical tradition and “what he names the metaphysics of presence [explains] that everything which is offered as present and for that very reason self-explanatory and self-sufficient [is] always already a remains and a trace of the absent, therefore, of something else/other” (Blagojević 2006: 47, fn 1). Pišta’s story unfolds as a disbelief in fixities, and a permanent ambiguity of “absent presence” (Derrida 2005: 377), past being the most emblematic, but not the only phenomenon of this mode of seeing the world.10 Therefore, the aesthetics of the Ocean, comparable above all to the music (Pišta is a classical music devotee), fades in the proximity of a poor remnant of a possibly never even existing past. This past acquires the contours of eternity. The time and space of the past merge in a chronotopic imagery, allowing a moment to take up an eternal interval:

9 10

“to je i više od istine i ne treba na to gledati kao na nešto stvarno, što podleže zakonu gravitacije”. “In this way, the construction of binary oppositions and a dualistic model of thinking (characteristic of metaphysical tradition) is confronted by the idea about the indecisiveness of thinking the oppositions and constant elusiveness of the sense and meaning.” (Blagojević 2006: 47–48, fn 1).

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

Ali svežina mladosti, zapravo, sama mladost... Prvo zelenilo vrba u rano proleće, ima li ičeg nežnijeg? Nežnost kao svežina. Ah, to je sve! Neprolazna mladost na kauču u decembarsko nedeljno poslepodne. Rodili smo se samo zbog tog časa. (76) But the freshness of youth, the youth itself... First green willow leaves in the early spring, is there anything as tender? Tenderness as freshness. Ah, that is everything! Eternal youth on the couch on a December Sunday afternoon. We were born for that moment only. As if the protagonist’s life, feeling of meaningfulness and wholeness was completed in the past, which is the reason why he reaffirms his relationship to the Bernardi’s room, a valuable furniture set relating to the past in a peculiar way. The narrator asserts that he himself is “that furniture without a residue” (66)11 . This absolute identification makes them inseparable: “I was afraid of the very thought that I might lose it, as if it were a question of life and death; I couldn’t imagine living without it.” (71)12 Moreover, the furniture is repeatedly described as being able to enclose someone’s absence: Nameštaj je pojam umetničkog dela, nešto najdragocenije, kao negativ kiparstva, prilagođen je ljudskom telu koje je odsutno, tako sam razmišljao. Bernardijev dizajn je upravo podvlačio tu prostornu odsutnost, upražnjeno mesto. Jednostavno, ne treba niko da sedi u tom naslonjaču ili na tom stolcu koji je samo čisto biće. Ili neko ipak sedi, ali se ne vidi. To je još zanimljivije. (44) Furniture is the very idea of an art work, the most precious thing, as it were, a negative of sculpture, adjusted to the human body which is absent, I contemplated. Bernardi’s design highlighted precisely that spatial absence, an empty place. Simply, nobody should sit in that armchair or that chair which is a pure being. Or somebody sits but is invisible. That is even more interesting. As I will show later, Pišta’s identification with the furniture as an object with a lack is counteracted by the identification taking place in the Mercedes car wreck, whose absent owner Pišta would substitute. But, what is important in the context of knowing and possibly even accessing the past is that the two objects transpose the past time, and vice versa, the time exists in, that is, as objects. Revisiting the Yugoslav Neo-avant-garde’s reism, orientation “toward the Thing [in which] all is total externality, all is only the world of things, physical things which are in space” 11 12

“ja sam taj nameštaj bez ostatka”. “već sam se bojao i same pomisli na rastanak od njega, kao da je to bilo pitanje života i smrti, nisam mogao da zamislim da živim bez njega”.

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(Kermauner in Kopicl 2003: 98-99)13 , objects come into focus of the narration as they are in fact de-objectivized. In this narrative the car is a non-car, the furniture is a non-furniture. What could one conclude about the protagonist whose main focus are those non-objects? The car wreck unambiguously indicates the status of the past in the present as deteriorated and worn out, together with ridiculing the concept of a mobile home by the image of a ‘stationary’ car.14 A perfect piece of the “technological reproduction” is now redundant and useless. Yet, the narrator’s Benjaminan imagination distinguishes another “work of art”, furniture set mentioned for the first time to delineate precisely its artistic constitution: though it was a pleasure watching it, it was pretty uncomfortable (17)15 . Paradoxically, none of the ‘products’ is functional. Furthermore, the apparent protagonist’s disconnection from the society, his isolation and a loose relationship with his parents are the expressive, ironized depiction of his alienation. But, going beyond rhetoric of the post-modern discourse, Tišma’s concept of alienation has been informed by the Marxist theorizing on the humans’ relationship to objects, importantly, objects of their labour. That is why the marked ‘product’ character of the furniture and the car wreck facilitates their description as “alien object[s]” (Marx in Elster 1999: 37). Through venerating the commodities of the Yugoslav past, their status is determined by the Marxist idea of objectification, historically existing in the high industrialization and modernization emblematic for Yugoslav times, entailing also the narrator’s respect for industrial products, as result of the factory workers’ labour. Yet, his attachment to the mentioned objects is narrativized as the alienation, a stage further in the process of objectification: The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realisation is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realisation of labour appears

13

14

15

This perspective of the narration could be also interpreted as an ironizing of the poetics of chosisme in which the objects are employed to portray “human life mainly in terms of character’s acquisition, use and disposal of objects” (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 2002: xi). The old car wreck inhabited by the protagonist who then undertakes an imaginary journey to the past, is also the theme of Đorđe Jakov’s story Na putu (On the Road; from the anthology: Der Engel und der rote Hund, 2011). The figure of the father, an imaginary female fellow traveller, and the general ambiance of the story enable the comparison with Tišma’s novel, whereas the paradoxical ‘static ride’ could be read as the figure of melancholia. The editor of the anthology Der Engel und der rote Hund, Angela Richter interprets the situation of the protagonist who “is stuck in an old car and lives there remembering something that cannot be reached any longer” as emblematic of the Serbian and post-Yugoslav everyday life (Richter 2011: 10). “bio je prilično neudoban, ali zato beše užitak za oko”.

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

as loss of realisation for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. (Marx in Elster 1999: 37) Hence, Pišta’s affection for the non-objects could be read as a Marxist critique of the capitalist production which pauperizes the working class; protagonist is one of those “humiliated and insulted” (27), “the miserable” (72). The absence integrated into the narrativized objects appears to be the absence of people in the process of their alienation from the products they created. The objects are the melancholic reminders of people’s absence, understood, however, both nostalgically and critically. Another interpretative framework of understanding the protagonist’s relationship to the objects is surely that of Herbert Marcuse.16 His analysis of the human’s identification with the objects focuses on the emotions behind the commodification (and the commodification of the emotions). Parallel to the negative identification, Pišta’s recognizes himself in the car and furniture the way “people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.” (Marcuse 1964). If the Yugoslav Golden age was the period of the commodification of the everyday life, nostalgia for it also implies a ‘recognition in a commodity’. While asking the question about the possibility to possess, colonize the past, to invest the meaning or ‘matter of the past’ into the objects (furniture set, the car), the attempt is ridiculed if the Marxist understanding of objects as fetish is applied. Marx dubbed fetish “the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx in Elster 1999: 64), which is emblematic of the religious world. Hence, this vision enables the products to “appear as independent beings endowed with life” (ibid.: 65), a process “inseparable from the production of commodities” (ibid.). Maybe that is the reason Pišta says how even back in his childhood he knew it would be the last thing he would sell out (17). Yet, while perpetuating an idealistic relationship to the past – again, the furniture set has been narrativized as the object of admiration and veneration – it turns out by the end of the story that what made it not only unique, but representative of the most sophisticated Yugoslav design might have been fake. Pišta finds out that what seemed to be the designer Bernardi’s furniture, might be simply a mass produced Swedish furniture whose modernist minimalist concept and form could have influenced the designer. The ‘truth’ about the furniture is revealed by a collector Mitar Jovanić. He arrives to purchase the set, estimating as an expert in this kind of merchandise, that it is not an authentic Bernardi’s set.17 But then, the collector represented himself falsely 16 17

“We were the children of Herbert Marcuse and Susan Sontag. The book Styles of Radical Will was our Bible.” (Tišma 2014: 186) Pišta had a warning dream right before the furniture dealer Jovanić called to ask if he would sell it: he dreamed of Bernardi himself who called wanting to buy the furniture for his daugh-

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as a respectable retired priest Marin Žanetić and paid with a counterfeit money (102).18 Three stages of false identification or attribution (the false design, forged money and the fraudulent name) convey the extent to which the past – represented by the furniture – is misleading: “And so went my false “bernardi,” down the drain, together with 30 plus years of my life.” (82)19 The false value of the furniture automatically leads to a disillusioned view on the past and the values Pišta believed in: “All was an illusion” (82). But, in fact, ‘all was ambiguity’: the corrupt scheme of the collector can be used as argument to reverse it all back to authenticity – the crook simply lied in order to get the precious belongings cheap and easy. Whether it is the original piece by the famous Yugoslav designer, or the Swedish furniture which was in fashion back in the time (arguably also mocked as the bad copy of the original Yugoslav design), the set ultimately decides the identity of the owner. When Pišta realizes that what he possesses might not be the real Bernardi, he feels he was living a lie all his life. Accordingly, if the dealer was cheating, the buying of the furniture could be read as a metaphor of falsifying the past, quite similar to the insights made by the narrator in Olja Savičević Ivančević novel about the uncertain status of memory: “the past isn’t what it was” (Savičević Ivančević 2010: 92). For, the “meaning the past has for us is as open to change as is the future, and depends on how we practically relate to the present” (Buden 2017: 348). Alike the ‘substance’ of the past that has been preserved, though renamed, in the novel Farewell, Cowboy (the figure of the wall and the inscription it encloses), the past in the Bernardi’s Room is gone, but not forgotten: “memory divided, decreased, but could not turn into oblivion” (13)20 . Hence, the precious objects (or worthless products) are testing the limits of the possibility to ‘objectify’ the past. Marxist rhetoric highlights the possibility of possessing, that is, commodifying the past, but then it becomes clear that the past has transformed into a fetish. There is a distinction among the two objects, which enables transgressing the limits of the fetishized past. As Tišma explicated: “The wreck is closer to the body, similar to a shell, armour. It represents a time machine, a place of memory, of

18

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ter who would turn 18. Eventually, Bernardi asks the confused dreamer to take care of his furniture, particularly the chair (42), the important emblem of the past, when Pišta declares that he has no chair (“Ali ja nemam stolac”; 42), allowing the possibility that he has no past whatsoever. A Mephistophelic character of the buyer hides behind a persiflage of Tišma’s actual selling of his art works to Marinko Sudac, a collector from Croatia. Sudac’s Collection is “considered the largest private collection and the most complete collection of the avant-garde art in the region”. (https://www.avantgarde-museum.com/en/Marinko-Sudac pe4615 [1.5.2018]). I thank professor Gojko Tešić for the information about this affair. “Ode moj lažni ‘bernardi’, odoše mojih trideset i kusur lažnih godina.” “Sećanje se delilo, smanjivalo, ali nikako nije moglo da postane zaborav.”

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

imagination. It symbolizes both the motion and lodging. The room is the space of the purely aesthetic, it is a configuration.” (Tišma 2014: 180). The car wreck is a relic of a ‘real life’, dilapidated, so, unlike the furniture in this novel succumb to the work of time. Also, the car wreck as the machine relates to the body, as a metonymy of a human (who imagines, remembers). Pišta’s entering it, becoming a part of it is what contrasts the car to the room as an ‘independent being endowed with life’. The furniture is a purely aesthetic space – it paradoxically contains past which is inaccessible. The very ‘absence’ it contains suggest the past as a fetishized belongings. Finally, the narrator speculates about the possibility of uniting the two objects, which should, as it seems, enable the impossible past to appear in the present, or – as we would see next – effectuate a more radical shift in the protagonist’s sense of time and space: Stvorio je taj predivni nameštaj, koji je večan, neuništiv. Sati naših života koji su proticali pored njega, gde su? Nameštaj miruje, damari biju u Agramu, u Đurvideku, na Jadranskoj magistrali. Ipak, kako spojiti mercedes sa Bernardijevom sobom? (63) He created that wonderful furniture, eternal, indestructible. The hours of our lives which passed by it, where are they? The furniture stands still, the heart beats in Agram, Đurvidek, on the Adriatic highway. Still, how to bond a Mercedes with Bernardi’s room? While the toponyms of nostalgia – forged over their fictionalized names Agram and Đurvidek21 – suggest that the (Golden) past is undoubtedly the Yugoslav one, the past as a nostalgic imagery is obviously not satisfactory for the protagonist. What would happen with the past depends upon this encounter between the two objects, that also reflect the relationship and the characteristics of the protagonist’s parental couple.

21

Zagreb and Novi Sad.

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VI 2.

Parental Home: On (Im)possible Identifications Kada je odnos polova u pitanju, stvar je prilično komplikovana, postoji mnogo kombinacija, mnogo varijeteta. To je zato što je pol maska. Svako biće je u suštini androgino, pola mama, pola tata. [...] Ne možete biti sigurni šta se iza te maske krije. [...] nijedan identitet nije čist, nije apsolutan. (Slobodan Tišma)22

The narrator develops psychoanalytical arguments to narrativize his family history, together with the history of the dissolved country of Yugoslavia. The father figure is explicitly linked to the Order, to the Symbolic, whereas the mother circumscribes the protagonist’s oedipal complex development, his neurotic connectedness to her, but eventually assists in the process of his gender and sexual identification and emancipation. The mother had left when Pišta was a small boy, in a way enabling the depiction of the ‘broken’ father and son family inside the psychoanalytical discourse that is in fact parodied, and used to mock both the heteronormative presumptions of family relationships (the “oedipal triangle”), and the narrator’s alleged traumas, and deviances. Instead of being a language of ‘translating’ one’s hidden or ‘real’ personality and identity, the psychoanalytical discourse is used as an instrument of subversion of all knowledge about the ‘identity’.23 After they had been left on their own, the father and the son continue living “as men”, “in the world of men”. These masculinity phrases are further ironized over the masculine metaphoric of football watching: “We debated mostly about politics, but football was also in the centre of our attention.” (18)24 What’s more, the ‘life in the world of men’ is described as a return to a harmonious and natural order of things: “When mom left, the two of us continued living as men. Yes, I stayed with my father. Since he was a soldier and spent time mostly in the world of men, it was

22

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Regarding the relationship between the sexes, the issue is pretty complicated, there are many combinations, many varieties. Because the sex is a mask. Every being is basically androgynous, half mom and half dad. […] You can’t ever be sure what’s behind the mask. […] no identity is pure, or absolute (Tišma 2014: 229). The narrator’s perspective is in this respect critical and functions as Derrida’s fourth angle missing in Lacan’s interpretation of the “oedipal triangle”: the narrator is simultaneously the ‘producer’ of the text and the analyst. The removal of the narrator as the producer of effects is a typical psychoanalytical reductionist approach to literature (Derrida in Biti 1997: 325). “Debatovalo se najviše na političke teme, ali i fudbal je bio u centru pažnje”.

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

a normal thing for him.” (17)25 That everyday life involves solely men (father, friends dwelling in the flat, the character of a doctor, the collector-dealer) is an ordinary thing. As the author himself specified in an interview: “Besides, it is clear that ‘his flat’, in which the father’s word represented the law, became the debate club. But only men take part in the debate” (Tišma 2014: 217). The group of his acquaintances and friends who lived in his flat discussing politics are even described as a “fag society” (“pedersko društvo”): “Politicians are very prone to it, it dates back to antiquity, those ancient Greeks again. Today also every politician has a boyfrienderrand” (36)26 . A stereotypical homoerotic charge of male gatherings and activities counteracts a straightforward link among men and certain type of masculinity, as is the case in the figure of a soldier, but also in its minor counterpart, a football fan. Women, on the other hand, are the protagonists of Pišta’s imagination, fantasies and memories. Unlike the Biblical cry for the father forsaking the son (after the father would have also left), the cry for the mother who left is articulated from the perspective of both the son and the father (“us”), who in shock realize a woman’s detachment from her ‘natural’ roles of mother and wife. “The world of men” is, hence, the community of the abandoned (sons). To illustrate how the mother abandoned her household and family roles, the narrator informs that she actually never cooked: she never prepared the “masculine” spicy food with the meat the father loved (36), and eventually completely refused to prepare food. Peculiarly, Pišta benefitted from this decision, since he ate the chocolate as a replacement for the homemade food: “mom was feeding me chocolate bars” (36). But, the father, the soldier, persisted in effecting his military masculine function by having even his meals in the barracks in the end. Transparent psychoanalytical metaphors construct the image of the father as representing the symbolic order: he is the chief, the owner of their flat, and is accredited good discipline and authority. He is a ‘the Father’, with a capital ‘F’ (‘O’): Bio sam stravično ljut, sa govnetom u gaćama, rekao sam im: Otac se uskoro vraća, videćete šta će da bude, sa njim nećete moći da se zajebavate kao sa mnom (19) [I was terribly angry, with shit in my pants, I told them: Father will return soon, you’ll see how things are going to be; you won’t be able to screw him over like you can with me];

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26

“Kada je mama otišla, nas dvojica nastavili smo da živimo kao muškarci. Da, ostao sam sa ocem. Njemu je to bilo normalno s obzirom da je bio vojnik i da je vreme uglavnom provodio u svetu muškaraca.” “Političari su jako skloni tome, to vuče korena još od antike, opet ti stari Grci. I danas svaki političar ima svog dečka-potrčka.”

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ja nisam bio gazda, nisam bio autoritet kao otac (17) [I was not a boss, nor an authority like my father]. Though the father works as a medical doctor in the army, his connectedness to the military not only ensures the symbolism of the authority, but also motivates the plot. When the war in Yugoslavia broke out, the father left for the Croatian coast and remained there after the war had ended. Pišta actually never saw him again. The connection to the father is broken with the outbreak of war: they only infrequently talk on the phone up untill the moment the father dies. The father is gone and it becomes clear that the protagonist is not a boy any longer: not only that he says he stopped fooling around after the father had left, but he also stopped receiving money from him. Also, the symbolic of the flat as the realm of the father’s patriarchal power develops as the lost sanctuary, a persiflage of the ‘paradise lost’: “It was the army’s demand to leave the flat, since it was my father – who after the civil war left the army and stayed in another country – who had the right of occupation.” (69)27 Like the father from the Farewell, Cowboy, Pišta’s father’s vanishing coincides with the war. Therefore, he is an emblem of the (Yugoslav) past as the space of the forever lost time and space recoverable only in nostalgic memories, but also of an authoritarian system of hierarchies and violence behind the war (the military and state apparatus) through which the country dissolved. Hence, the father’s imprint is temporal: he is absent from the present, his narrative unfolds only in the past and he is past in a way. The crucial episode of Pišta’s remembering is the episode with the race in his father’s car 28 on the Adriatic coast. Father’s residence after the outbreak of war, it secures his connection to the space and time of the Yugoslav past, firmly associating him with the notion of a homeland. Moreover, the father is aware of his symbolic function, knowing since the very beginning that the boy “needed mom and no one else” (28)29 . He is conscious of the fact that he “as the bearer of the symbolic order brings in the rupture into this idyllic unity” between a mother and a child (Biti 1997: 324). The mother will actually be the one to pronounce the actual death of the father, bringing the news about his death to Pišta by the end of the novel.

27 28

29

“U pitanju je bio zahtev vojske da se iselim iz stana, s obzirom da je nosilac stanarskog prava, a to je bio moj otac, posle građanskog rata napustio vojsku i ostao da živi u drugoj državi.” The imagery of the Yugoslav past is shared among the post-Yugoslav authors and readers/viewers who effortlessly identify with it. A scene fusing similar motifs is the oneiric picture of the father (YA officer) driving his fića (emblematic Yugoslav car) in Miljenko Jergović’s novel Buick Rivera (2002). The novel was also filmed in 2008 (dir. Goran Rušinović). “A dobro je znao da je meni potrebna samo mama i niko drugi.”

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

Unlike the father, the mother is portrayed regardless of the heritage and tradition belonging to ‘parental narratives’. Similar to other women, she is ‘self-made’: “Women usually have no parents. My mom was also nobody’s daughter, she had no parents.” (88)30 To have no parents means not only having no heritage or tradition to pass or continue, but having no ‘basis’, which is a critical aspect of Pišta’s nonessentialist understanding of an identity. Also, while the father absence coincides with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, mother becomes ‘the absent one’ once Pišta enters his teenage years. A psychoanalytical reading discloses the mother’s absence – a fact that she abandoned his father and their home and left with another man to a remote place – as her sexual unavailability. The motif of jealousy (directed to the father) is forged as the unknown fear originating in the opposition between the inside and the outside: the correlation of the mother and the home is associated with his constant fear of the locked door, suggesting a situation of the parents being inside together, while the boy would be left outside alone. Therefore, when the mother was really gone, his fear of the locked door also disappeared. These spatial metaphors (inside, out, closed, open) are also the indicators of the separation: as Julia Kristeva asserts one must “kill” their mother, since for “a man and a woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous” (Kristeva 1989: 27). Pišta’s quest for a mysterious woman/women from the past, together with his own gender/sex experimenting and final ‘maturation’ happens against this peculiar relationship to his mother. Mostly conveyed as longing, this relationship is also typically self-ironic: “I’d cry out on a corner, I’d squeal like a piglet: Mom, why have you forsaken us?!” (25)31 . Unlike the one-dimensional figure of the father who is portrayed over a psychoanalytical caricature doppelganger, the mother assumes various ‘incarnations’ that make her character both more complex and considerably more ambiguous. She is attributed psychical characteristics of a numinous creature from Serbian mythology called vila, a type of a nymph. This ‘meta-description’ is further supported by locating her in the farm in the village Rađevica (26) on the mountain in south-eastern Serbia. Mountains are dwelling places of vilas who are – equivalent to Pišta’s mother – characterized by the physical beauty and corresponding vanity. The mother is described as “tall, a model type”, having pale skin, black hair and different eye colour, which might have discovered “her deceitful and untrustworthy nature” (26)32 . In addition, the mother was born in Homolje (16), a region in southeastern Serbia well-known for its magic ritual practices and beliefs. Nevertheless, the mother’s supernatural traits are simultaneously naturalized (and made fun of) as her New Age fondness of hippy culture and the accompanying life-style: “She

30 31 32

“Žene obično nemaju roditelje. Moja mama takođe nije bila ničija ćerka, nije imala roditelje.” “Povikao bih na nekom ćošku, skičao bih kao prase: Mama, zašto si nas napustila?!” “taj detalj je možda govorio o njenoj prevrtljivosti, nepouzdanosti”.

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was totally hippy now, dressed in a long tunic with colourful flowers pattern, her arms and neck were covered in all manner of trinkets […]. She smelled of ‘patchouli’ […], lived in a hippy commune.” (26)33 Importantly, the car wreck Pišta inhabits bares the mother’s traces. She was smoking the “Dutch tobacco of the brand Samson” (26), which he sensed first time he entered the wreck, a “magical Holland pipe tobacco” (8). Along with mother’s traces the car wreck brings him in the proximity of the ocean: the car used to slide down the ocean shore (10)34 . The car wreck is described as a shell, it shines, tastes and smells like salt or a wave (45): Ušao sam u olupinu [...] zapljusnuo me je miris okeana (65) [I entered the wreck [...] a smell of the ocean splashed me]; Ležao sam u olupini kao u čamcu (77) [I lied down in a wreck like in a boat]; Liznuo sam volan: bio je slan. (8) [I licked the wheel: it tasted salty]; Iznenada liznuo sam okvir vrata, bio je slan, baš baš slan. (45) [I unexpectedly licked the door frame, it was salty, really salty]. Though inside a car wreck, Pišta feels he started living at the bottom of the Ocean (47)35 . He sometimes even sees the dark-blue surface of the Ocean on the engine top (10).36 Nevertheless, the attributes of the Ocean are recurring as his mother’s features. She has ocean-blue eyes: “Mom looked at me sadly with her big oceanblue eyes” (103)37 , and is repeatedly evoked in the proximity of the Ocean. Furthermore, Pišta’s entering the car shell is the staging of a ‘regressus ad uterum’, “a wish to return to the origin of life, the sea” (“Sándor Ferenczi”, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2018). A (psychoanalytical) identification of the mother and the ocean indicate Pišta’s desire to be again “oceanically at one with [his] nurturer” (Hunter 1997: 265). A pre-Oedipal unity of the mother and the child is what Julia Kristeva theorizes as the chora, a space of the semiotic. The semiotic is the space of instincts, of the non-symbolic: Pišta listens to the music in the back seat of the uterus-like car wreck, like a “child [that] has not yet acquired formal language and communicates [in ways] that resemble a musical, rhythmic sound and that lack sense, meaning 33

34 35 36 37

“Sada je bila potpuno u hipi fazonu, obučena u dugu tuniku na raznobojne cvetiće, ruke i vrat su joj bili prekriveni svakojakim đinđuvama […]. Mirisala je na “pačuli”. […] živela u nekoj hipikomuni”. “klizio autostradom koju su zapljuskivali talasi okeana”. “često mi se činilo kao da živim na dnu Okeana”. The ocean appears both as a capitilized and a not-capitalized word. “Mama me je pogledala tužno svojim velikim okeanskoplavim očima.”

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and structure” (Schippers 2011: 26). As already said, the mother is represented by the metaphors of the semiotic, while the father is the bearer of the symbolic. Also, the association of the mother and the ocean essentilize her femaleness, relegating it to the organic unconscious nature. The symbolic of the ocean and the figure of the mother could be also seen as fusing and evoking a creation myth: “in the context of the Orphic mytheme, namely the mytheme which brings around the necessity to perpetually return inside the Mother (that is, inside the sea as its French homonym); [it is] the archetypal foremother of humankind, named Lilith (or the dark mother)” (Šeleva 1999: 129–130). Pišta’s eviction from the paternal home and an attempt to find a new, ‘selfruled’ home are narrativized over this ‘regressus ad uterum’ scene which is also “one of the fatal strategies of the process of individuation, or autonomization” (Šeleva 1999:130). Though what manifests as the regression to the stage at which a child doesn’t feel separate or independent from the mother, it concurrently articulates his desire to find a new home: “building and being obsessed with Home requires a double obsession of the subject, namely, that they love and complete the autonomization, simultaneously with diffusing into the archetype of a possessive mother, who swallows the subject inside the blessed monad of the womb” (ibid.: 133). This imagery should, above all, convey the ‘maternal symbolic’ of home, helping also understand the space of the car wreck Pišta inhabits: A wreck or a shell represents a place, everybody’s and nobody’s, a human is an intruder everywhere, an alien, with no belongings. Unlike an apartment or a house, which always has more than one room, a wreck is a single integral space and in that comparable to the body, it is a shelter, a hole, a prison, or it could be compared to a uterus. (Tišma 2014: 215) The mother represents and is represented by the spatiality, her (motherly) relationship with a child is materialized in the space and the discourse of the semiotic: Uvukao bih se u olupinu, skupio se u vreći kao fetus, na zadnjem sedištu, stavio slušalice iz kojih je u moje uši direktno uvirao adagio espressivo, veliki talas iz Desete, nikad završene simfonije jednog austrijskog kompozitora, i ugođaj je bio kompletan. Inače, muzika mi je uvek bila najistrajniji pratilac. Bio sam veliki zaljubljenik tzv. klasične muzike (8–9) 38 38

This is a compelling detail, one of the motifs which function as the mechanism of the secret which ought to be deciphered. The suggested composer is Gustav Mahler, the Tenth symphony is the last piece he wrote. It is a dissonant and paradoxical piece, famous in the history of classical music for its specific structure. It was written in the situation of Mahler’s suffering after his wife Alma committed infidelity (she had an affair with the Bauhaus founder and architect Walter Gropius!). The correspondences go as far as that after this experience Mahler started seeing Sigmund Freud for psychoanalytical therapy.

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I would creep into the shell, crouch inside the bag as a fetus on the back seat, put on the headphones which poured the adagio espressivo directly into my ears, the great wave from the Tenth, never-finished symphony of an Austrian composer, and the feel was complete. Moreover, music was always my most persistent companion. I was a big enthusiast for the so-called classical music. Yet, this home mother represents, or the home she offers is, unlike the ‘father’s home’, a (familial) space out of the ordinary, maybe even a home as an impossible space. Therefore, while the father ‘stands for’ the symbolic and is responsible for the realms of home and past – in the most conventional meaning this spatiality and temporality can have – the mother is ‘in authority’ of the temporal and spatial ‘intervals’ which are best described as possible, in the making. ‘Mother’s home’ is the “interzone, a place of a host and an intruder, neither inside, nor outside” (Hillis Miller in Šeleva 1999: 131). These distinctions apparently fit the difference among the Bernardi’s room and the Mercedes car wreck, announcing also their final encounter: Tako se najzad “Bernardi” približio “mercedesu”, dogodilo se nešto o čemu sam sanjao. Iako su se komadi nameštaja tek nazirali kroz najlon, osećao se taj erotični susret dve vrhunske marke, dva velelepna artefakta. (72) So ‘Bernardi’ finally approximated the ‘Mercedes’, my dreams come true. Though the furniture pieces only showed through the nylon, the erotic encounter of the two top trademarks, two magnificent artefacts could be sensed in the air. Applied for the first time, the writing of the two nouns in quotation marks is noteworthy: though it is also a marker of a manufactured good, it points out that the car and the furniture set represent something else. While the remark about the ‘erotic’ encounter helps deciphering the personification, more principal characteristics of both the father and the mother reveal their connection to the two objects. The mother and her ‘doubles’ as figures of Pišta’s fantasies are associated to the car wreck, whereas the Bernardi’s room is the metaphor of the past, situated even inside the father’s domain, the flat Pišta needed to leave. Moreover, the ‘paternal metaphoric’ is underpinned by the imagined narrative about Bernardi as ‘the creator’ of furniture and his daughter Bernarda. While the protagonist wished for and wondered about the way to connect the two objects earlier, once also experiencing an esoteric vision of the car shell climbing up his back, and absorbing the whole of Bernardi’s room39 , the merging of the 39

“Kada sam posle otišao u stan, osećao sam stalno kao da sam v lupini, ta tamnoljubičasta školjka mi se popela na leđa, uneo sam je u sobu. Olupina je zapremala čitav prostor, tako da je i sav nameštaj bio u njoj. Ipak, pokušavao sam da olupinu zamenim velikim plavim okom, da je prevedem, da zauzmem poziciju izvan ljušture. Ali nemogućnost da se izađe iz ljušture,

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

two artefacts comes about as the effect of the plot resolution. While Pišta’s mother return coincides with his eviction, the reason she came was to bring the news about the father’s death (80). The father’s death is represented as the threshold, forged by the motifs of a grave, a door and a boundary, but also over the protagonist’s homelessness. Namely, Pišta finds the front door of their apartment in the garbage the day after the eviction (77), and takes it with him to the car wreck as a kind of a souvenir of the terminated past and the former home, that were both under the father’s sovereignty: “I was lying in the wreck like in a boat, right on the front door with my father’s name on it still. As if I was lying on his grave, but I wasn’t aware of that. Maybe I was crying in my sleep: Father, why have you forsaken me?” (77–78)40 Pišta is outside of ‘a home’ (sleeping on the broken off front door), and inside the non-home, the car wreck as a substitute of home. After fulfilling her ‘primary function’ and declaring the father’s death, the mother invites Pišta to live with her and the other fellow-women in a remote farm. Though at first declining, Pišta would eventually leave with his mother, completing the changeover which began as he left home and started dwelling in a car shell. But, before revealing the events of the finale, it is also necessary to understand the cultural and political context of the protagonist’s change.

VI 3.

Pol and Politika: Women in Pairs and the Politics of Literature Ali ruka je uvek ruka nekog drugog, moja ruka je, u stvari, tuđa ruka.41 Šta je ta devojka očekivala od mene? Iako, među nogama imam samo upražnjeno mesto, prazninu, što ona nije mogla ni naslutiti.42 (Slobodan Tišma)

40

41 42

iz jajeta, učinila mi se samo trenutna” (When I later went back to the flat I felt as if I was inside the shell, a dark-purple shell had climbed up my back, I brought it inside the room with me. The shell took up the whole space, so the furniture was inside of it too. Still I tried to replace the shell with the great blue eye, to take it across, to occupy the position outside the shell. But the impossibility of getting out of shell, of the egg, seemed only momentary; 45–46) “Ležao sam u olupini kao u čamcu, na vratima na kojima je još stajalo očevo ime. Kao da sam ležao na njegovom grobu, nisam bio ni svestan toga. Možda sam ponekad i u snu zaječao: Oče, zašto si me napustio?” But the hand is always somebody else’s, my hand is actually a hand of a stranger. (92) What did this girl expect from me? Though, I have only an empty space between my legs, a void, which she couldn’t even guess. (12)

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While the past of childhood and youth is conveyed via the tropes of nostalgia, becoming in a way an imaginary past, the recent history is transposed in a documentary form. One of the few ‘appearances’ of historical reality occurs in the novel’s chapter titled “Pol i politika” (Sex and Politics), a paronomastic word play associating sex and politics, and suggesting that sex/gender is politics, that sex is political. Pišta explains how his gender discontent was a spontaneous “expression of revolt because a person was denied the right to live on his own terms. It was the time of interregnum.” (32)43 Referring to the so-called transition to a democratic political system – which in Yugoslavia coincided with the war – he figuratively also speaks of the ‘interregnum’ of gender, its transition. For, the very notion of gender “understood as a societal, historical and political construction, leaves an open space for change, for political agency in the sense of de-construction or re-construction of the gender possibilities, together with redirecting the power and the political agency which would lead to the alternation of the existing gender relations” (Blagojević 2006: 49). By following the reasoning of his friend Berlinič who thinks Pišta does not understand things and should better not spout off about the politics (33), the narrator discloses the depreciating attitude the others show towards him. But, while it is clear that they see him as a fool and a silly outcast, he appropriates the label and puts on a jester mask. An expressive literary technique of the ‘wise fool’ institutes a Bakhtinian imagery of power and its comic destabilization, demystifying “the identity of the symbolic bond itself” (Kristeva 1997: 216). It turns out that “along with the singularity of each person and, even more, along with the multiplicity of every person’s possible identifications [one brings out] the relativity of his/her symbolic as well as biological existence” (ibid.). Accordingly, Pišta debunks the ‘symbolic bond’ between the individual and the ruined society: “I just wanted to get rid of the destroyed society, of ruined politicians.” (35)44 By juxtaposing the idealist ethics of politics and its mode in reality, Pišta asserts that there is no greater responsibility than the political one (49), though the politicians are often corrupt and criminals (50). Yet, those ‘truisms’ expand into the analysis of the political practices whose effects actually lead to Yugoslav wars. A denial of freedom of expression as an evidence of an authoritarian culture has been directly associated to the war and its consequences: “And again it was a single group of people deciding about everything, about the life and death, actually, a single man.” (33)45 The argument about oppressive culture and politics based in the discourse of ‘normality’, ‘norm’, leads Pišta to conclude: “Normality is the most dangerous thing”

43 44 45

“izraz revolta zbog nemogućnosti da se živi po svome. Beše doba interregnuma.” “Ja sam samo želeo da se rešim propalog društva, propalih političara”. “I opet je jedna grupa ljudi odlučivala o svemu, o životu i smrti, zapravo, jedan čovek.”

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

(34)46 . Contemplating whether Hitler himself might had actually been a hysteric, if behind his mask of a man there was a screaming woman (34), that is, if his denied identity had transformed into his ruthless illicit political action, the narrator eventually makes a controversial – a ‘not politically correct’ – conclusion. He supposes that Hitler was simply “too normal” (34). Pišta self-ironically continues that it is good he himself has no capacity to do something politically ambitious, since he is also frustrated: “My female identity was repressively denied.” (34)47 For this very reason, he tries to reclaim his female identity, by making a simple, yet ultimately improper gesture: “Out of spite I decided to speak about myself in the future from the female perspective, by using the feminine grammatical forms. I was not the slightest bit ashamed.” (31)48 Building on Butler, Blagojević maintains that the distinction sex/gender is untenable, and what we call sex, anatomy and body could be understood as the “materialization of the norm, rather than static matter” (Blagojević 2006: 51). All about the ban on the possibility to choose one’s identity, including the gender, is a fundamentally political matter. Pišta rebels against this materialization of the norm, desiring to be a woman, and does so by talking in feminine grammatical gender, unlike the more widespread practice of dressing, therefore, looking as a woman: Da sam počeo da se oblačim kao žena i da izgledam kao žena, utisak koji bi ostavio govor u ženskom rodu bio bi mnogo slabiji, izazivao bi manji šok, pošto bi ženskim izgledom već najavljivao taj ženski nastup, govor u ženskom rodu. (32) If I started wearing women’s clothes and tried looking as a woman, the impression my feminine gender speaking would be diminished, it wouldn’t be so shocking, since the feminine looks would have already suggested the female performance, the feminine gender of speaking. Pišta’s decision not to cross-dress indicates the cultural expectations about the gender, when one’s looks already direct the language form. Nevertheless, a feminist revision of those expectations leads to a conclusion that the body is in fact “a site for play with categories” (Conboy et al. 1997: 6). Also, Pišta’s experiment suggests the arbitrariness of the linguistic structures and their cultural contingency, consecutively reassessing the representation, visibility and agency of women in politics. (32). However, positing the feminine gender as a universal and neutral instead, doesn’t only expose a bias behind the allegedly disinterested language regulations. Pišta’s

46 47 48

“Nema ništa opasnije od normalnosti.” “represivno mi je bio uskraćen taj ženski identitet”. “Iz inata odlučio sam da ubuduće govorim u ženskom rodu. Nije me uopšte bilo sramota.”

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gesture at least in part resolves the ‘Irigarayan’ paradox theorized by Shoshana Felman: if the woman’s silence is constitutive of the discourse as such, from which position does a woman speak, when and if she eventually does? Discussing if it is a matter of biology, or a strategy, Felman asks if the woman is “speaking the language of men or the silence of women?” (Felman 1993: 24). Though Felman negatively assesses the possibility – and a common literary strategy – of speaking ‘as, in the name, for’ women, precisely by not being a woman, but wanting to become a woman – a woman’s woman – through language, could be an alternative act of siginification. Henceforth, Pišta starts talking to Berlinič in feminine gender about politics and joining the party (31), noticing at that moment that his friend – though not aware – is insecure about his masculinity, showing signs of basic gender anxiety (32)49 . Pišta adds that he might have confused Berlinič with his own politics, meaning his attitude towards the issues of sex and gender, since, in Berlinič’s “subconsciousness politics was exclusively a male thing” (32)50 . The mention of subconsciousness tackles the psychoanalytical discourse precisely because it is often employed to defend the argument about the binary and heteronormative sexual differences. The main speakers of the discourse are Berlinič and the psychiatrist Pišta occasionally visits. Pišta’s clear wish to change his sex becomes a matter of psychiatric examination, exposing medicine as the basic discourse of the cultural heteronormativity: Na pitanje psihijatra, koji me pol privlači, odgovorio sam kratko i jasno: ženski. Iako sam bio ubeđen da ne postoji nikakav ženski ili muški pol, ali nisam hteo da ga zbunjujem, na umu mi je bilo samo da ostvarim svoju želju. Naravno, psihijatrovo sledeće pitanje je bilo: A zašto onda želite da budete žensko? Ako vas privlače žene, vi ste muškarac. Upravo zato, bio je moj odgovor, želim da budem žena žene, jer me privlače žene, privlači me ženskost, želim čistu esencijalnu žensku ljubav, muškarci me u seksualnom smislu uopšte ne interesuju. Meni kao ženi žene potrebna je nežnost žene žene, ništa drugo. (30) When the psychiatrist asked me which sex attracts me, I said clearly: female. Though I was convinced that there is no female or male sex, but I didn’t want to confuse him, I just wanted to make my wish come true. Of course, the psychiatrist’s next question was: Why do you want to be a woman then? If you are attracted to women, you are a man. Precisely because of that, I answered, I want to be a woman’s woman, because I am attracted to women, I’m attracted to femininity, I desire a pure essential womanly love, men are sexually not interesting to me at all. I as a woman’s woman need the tenderness of a woman’s woman, nothing else. 49 50

“te svoje elementarne nesigurnosti u rodu”. Italics added for emphasis; “podsvesti politika je bila isključivo muška stvar”.

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

A ‘binary sophism’ about the ‘opposites attracting’ is challenged by Pišta’s claim that there are no sexes, and that he desires to be not only a woman, but a woman’s woman. The doctor then interprets his wish to change his sex as lesbianism, reminding him that he is “just a man”: “You are just a man, just passable, but still a man. Therefore, what you’re saying is a load of nonsense. (Which maybe wasn’t too far from the truth.)” (31)51 Unlike Pišta, the doctor sees Pišta’s body as defect, suggesting doing penis enlargement surgery on him. Taking on the vocabulary of the feminist revision of the Lacanian psychoanalytical theory Pišta refuses the offer, and ‘complies’ with his ‘undefined body’: To ne dolazi u obzir, glasio je moj odgovor, ne osećam nikakvu žudnju za penisom, apsolutno mi nije potreban, ni velik, ni mali. Nema polova, ja sam žena žene, svi muškarci su žene a žene su samo žene! Naravno, odbili su me. Ipak, nisam se mnogo rasrdio, znao sam da ću naći neku razonodu i u ovom nedefinisanom stanju u kom sam bio. (31) That is out of the question, was my answer, I feel no longing for a penis, I absolutely don’t need it, neither a big nor a small one. There are no sexes, I’m a woman’s woman, all men are women, and women are simply women! Of course, they rejected me. Still, I wasn’t too angry, I knew I’d find some amusement even in this indeterminate condition of mine. Pišta defies the discourse of sexual difference representing “a hierarchical relationship and the invariability of social roles intended for the male and female sex [which] are based precisely in the initial assumption about the invariable nature of the sexual difference” (Blagojević 2006: 48). On the contrary, Pišta’s own sexual/gender identity and body is felt and constructed outside the hierarchical and invariable (family, gender) relationships. He is, identical to his mother, “a child with no parents” (87). This highlights a fine connection to his mother as a ‘non-essential’ woman, but also stresses the importance of the family as a (psychoanalytical) site of the development of the feminine: “I was just a poor little maiden who prostituted herself within her own wrecked non-existent family.” (35)52 Furthermore, though Pišta does not naturally identify with his body, and feels estranged from it, he gradually realizes that the body is constitutional to an identity: Ipak, pripalo ti je telo, to je čista slučajnost, nisi ti o tome odlučivao. [...] I nije samo telo u pitanju, tu je i duša, duševni i mentalni sklop, način razmišljanja koji kako vreme odmiče počinje sve više i više da te sekira. (39–40) 51 52

“Vi ste samo muškarac, kakav-takav, ali ipak muškarac. Dakle, to što govorite je gomila gluposti. (Što možda i nije bilo daleko od istine.)” “Ja sam bio samo mala sirota devojka koja se prostituiše u uskim okvirima sopstvene raspadnute nepostojeće porodice”.

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Still, you acquired a body, a pure coincidence, you didn’t decide anything. […] And it is not only the body, there’s also the soul, spiritual and mental structure, way of thinking, which, as time goes by, upsets you more and more.

But, the protagonist’s body – like the bodies of the furniture set and the car wreck he identifies with – already ‘contains’ the difference. Pišta often imagined himself as someone else and wanted to change his sex due to the existing “preconditions” (30). These preconditions, ‘a lack’ of the adequate organ refers again to the binary psychoanalytical and cultural model, according to which “the male constitutes the norm, the positive, and the superior [and] the female is the aberration, the negative, the inferior. Her difference, as Mary Jacobus comments, is ‘defined as lack’, the difference of not being male” (M. Eagleton 1990: 204). In Lacan’s terms, in relation to the phallus a woman occupies the position of the lack, the place of not-having, of absence: Paradoxical as this formulation might seem, I would say that it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes through masquerade. It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved. (Lacan in Russo 1997: 330) Against the anticipated identification, Pišta occupies the position of “le manqué”, and destabilizes the very process of signification: Često sam zamišljao sebe kao nekog drugog. Želeo sam da promenim pol, imao sam uslova za to. Testisi mi se nikada nisu spustili. Moj penis u erekciji bio je dugačak, bolje reći kratak, tri santimetra. (30) [I often imagined myself as somebody else. I wanted to change my sex; the preconditions were there. My testicles never dropped. When erect, my penis was three centimetres long, or better, three centimetres short.];

Oslobođen sam vojske iz već poznatih razloga, ona stvar među mojim nogama nije im ulivala poverenje (69) [I didn’t have to serve in the army, for the reasons well-known, the thing between my legs was untrustworthy].

While the military had been a natural ambiance of the soldier father, Pišta is deferred from the military service. He fails to fulfil the demands of the ‘symbolic phallus’ which “though clearly not identical with the penis, nevertheless deploys the penis as its naturalized instrument and sign” (Butler 1990: 106). Nevertheless, Pišta concludes: “Still, I had my body, I was healthy, though slightly decentred, a

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

few centimetres only.” (74)53 The phrase “pomeren u nekom pravcu” (decentred) suggests a mental or social eccentricity, assessing also a physical characteristic inside the implied (hetero)normal standards that apparently favour ‘the average’, which, again, becomes ‘the normal’: “I miss the middle and the ends, so to put it. Especially the middle!” (61)54 For this reason Pišta’s identification with women points up the “meaning of difference – female difference not as lack but as ‘Otherness’” (M. Eagleton on Jacobus, 1990: 204). The subtitle of the novel – “for voice (countertenor) and orchestra” – makes reference to the historical existence of the castrato, a male singer whose voice register produced by the castration was equivalent to a female voice. In modern times replaced with the countertenor, castrato never reached sexual maturity, never became ‘a man’, as the one who can fulfil the ‘masculinity norm’, that is who can ‘fill the gap’ (in the meaning, symbolising): At the point in which the phallus is found to be missing in the mother, masculinity is set up as the norm, and femininity is set up as what masculinity is not. What is not there in the mother is what is relevant here; that is what provides the context for language. The expression which fills the gap is, perforce, phallocentric. (Mitchell 1990: 101) Yet, coming back to Bakhtin, the gap between the world and mind that he recognizes can be overcome by the transgredience, a “surplus of seeing” […], a boundary that through interaction (our changing places) can be overcome – transgressed – in experience” (Bakhtin in Holquist 2010: 30). It is the situation in which we “value and see ourselves as – Others” (Šeleva 1999: 132). Pišta sees himself through his mother, and through the ‘female other’, for indeed “the category of subjectivity, but also the politics which builds on it, purport the other sex as the constitutive moment of every subjectivity” (Blagojević 2006: 48). Comparable to the narrator’s hand which is “the hand of the other”, his whole bodily (sex, gender) identity is construed through the ‘othernization’.55 Pišta’s main concern – if a young woman he had raced with in his youth died or managed to save her life – concurs with the puzzle about the absent owner of

53 54 55

“Ipak, imao sam svoje telo, bio sam zdrav, iako pomeren u nekom pravcu tek za koji santimetar” “fale mi i sreda i krajevi, što bi se reklo. Naročito sreda!” In one of the closing chapters of the novel the narrator evokes the episode about the coat his mother had sewed for him. The coat shoulder pad detached from the shoulder and dropped at the pocket level, suggesting the pad now looked like a breast, single breast. Gender/sex identity is something ‘in-between’ (also, he would put on the coat and simply go out, make his habitual walks over the bridge on the Danube). Like the car wreck, the coat is an extension of his body (also depicted in bodily metaphoric), something he can ‘put on’, but once his mother fixes it, he refuses to wear it.

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the wreck (86). While on one side it becomes progressively more conceivable that “gentle female hands turned that wheel” (75)56 , there are no clear evidences about it: “there was no way for me to find out anything about it” (ibid.)57 . However, as already said, the past is anyways “not subject to the law of gravity” and is “more than the truth”, corresponding to the assumption the scientists in Luka Bekavac’s novel Viljevo make about the uncertainty of the evidences, not conclusive about the probability that the female protagonists might have lived sometime in the past.58 The potential faces of a mysterious woman ‘from the car’ change, but repetitively go back to Pišta’s initial guess indicating the mother: “At once I had the strong feeling that the owner of the car must have been a woman, all signs spoke in support of that vision, a woman or a girl who smoked a pipe. A pipe? I was convinced it was not a man.” (10)59 Like the absent woman-owner he imagines, the critical – and paradoxical – attribute of the mother is her absence. The ‘lack’ therefore refers also to Pišta’s longing for the imagined, or absent woman while he fantasizes inside the car wreck. His missing, “manque à être” is the inevitable effect of the desire, the difference: “le désir n’est ni l’appétit de la satisfaction, ni la demande d’amour, mais la différance qui résulte de la soustraction du premier à la seconde, le phénomène même de leur refente (Spaltung)” (Lacan 1966: 691). Lacan illustrates the lack by placing it in between the brackets, thus “indicating that it slips away into the absence. Because of the subversion which the signifier performs in the signified, and vice versa, statement can signify ‘everything else but what it says’” (Lacan in Biti 1997: 325). Therefore, the absence, inherent also to Derrida’s concept of différance, indicates the protagonist’s relationship with a mysterious woman: “in my subconscious the two faces merged into one, into one mysterious existing-non-existing beauty who lured me into a dangerous game” (87)60 . Pišta defers the revelation of the truth about the young woman who died in the car crash: “Maybe I didn’t want to find out the truth” (64)61 , but he still speculates about a possible sequel of events, wondering also if the woman who died could have been the designer Bernardi’s daughter, despite being aware of the fact that Bernardi had no children. Yet, he speculates that they were together at the Adriatic and that the young woman drove her father’s Mercedes, leading Pišta to conclude that

56 57 58 59

60 61

“nežne ženske ruke okretale taj volan”. “nisam imao načina da išta saznam o tome”. See Bekavac 2013: 293. “Jednog trena imao sam snažan osećaj da je vlasnik auta sigurno bila žena, svi znaci su govorili u prilog te vizije, žena ili devojka koja je pušila lulu. Lulu? Bio sam ubeđen da nije bio u pitanju muškarac.” “u mojoj podsvesti ti likovi stapali u jedan lik, u jednu tajanstvenu postojeću-nepostojeću lepoticu koja me je uvlačila u opasnu igru”. “Možda nisam ni želeo da saznam istinu.”

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

the young woman he had raced with was Bernardi’s daughter in person, making Bernardi commit suicide on the spot of her accident the next day. (65) The status of this truth – whether Pišta was involved in the accident and a young woman’s death – is analogous to the episode with the booklet he accidentally discovers in the car. The booklet appears to be an important clue in Pišta’s quest for the owner of the car: Možda je između korica te knjižice samo slika, neki lik koji želi da me vidi, koji se probija sa dna prema meni? Tajanstvena žena koja me zove? Vlasnica ili vozačica mercedesa, koja možda više nije ni živa, kao što ni mercedes više nije živ. Ali u ovoj situaciji, šta je živo a šta mrtvo, beše teško odredivo. (91) Maybe between the covers of that booklet there is only a photo, an image of someone who wants to see me, who cuts through from the bottom up towards me? A mysterious woman who calls me? The owner or driver, maybe no longer alive, the same way the Mercedes is not alive any longer. But in this situation it was difficult to define what was alive and what dead. Though he was very near to opening it and looking inside, Pišta hesitates, defers the decision. He in fact does not want to see it.62 Later he turns the pages of the mysterious booklet, but the text disappears (94), being “a message without words, like a secret” (94)63 . Booklet is a “Lacanian phallic signifier, which comes into play to achieve signification only if it is veiled and invisible” (Bellamy 1996: 165).64 The impossibility to establish an unambiguous relation between ‘the signifier’ and ‘the signified’, that is, a reality of permanent openness and/or duality of meaning remains central in Bernardi’s Room. As the author clarified: “a notebook that Pišta doesn’t dare taking into his hands, since the booklet as a fetish bears, i.e. hides the essence of the very difference, of a definite truth which threatens to tear down the illusion, the ‘either – or’” (Tišma 2014: 218). It is neither ‘either-or’, nor ‘one or the other’, but rather ‘both’. This difference/différance, a perpetual deferment of the 62

63 64

The situation recurs when Pišta wraps the furniture set in the plastic, in order to be able to imagine it (42); also, there was a “bezimeni” (no name) flatmate in his flat but he avoids finding out who he was: “Nisam uopšte znao ko je on. Uporno sam izbegavao da od Berliniča ili bilo od koga drugog tražim informacije o njemu.” (I didn’t at all know who he was. I was avoiding getting any information about him from Berlinič or anybody else. 47) “Poruka bez reči, kao tajna”. Lacan’s interpretation of Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter” is relevant for Pišta’s hesitation and the elusive content of the booklet. Interaction among the protagonists of Poe’s story is decided neither by the characters themselves, nor by the letter; the readers don’t learn the content of the letter (“ne nous dit rien du message qu’elle véhicule”; Lacan 1966: 27). The letter is purloined, appropriated, meaning that the signifier is left ‘without a signification’. Hence, being a symbol of absence, the letter is “the signifier which distributes the desire [...]; signifier [which of] the holder is deprived in the very moment of possession” (Biti 1997: 325).

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possibility to find out the ‘truth’, and likewise to determine one’s identity associates to the logic of the desire: Jedino što mi taj tajanstveni predmet, to zavodljivo telo stalno izmiče. No, razlog je i moja hinjena neodlučnost, stalno odlaganje orgazma. (86) [Only that the mysterious object, the alluring body is always slipping away. Nevertheless, the reason was my pretended indecisiveness, enduring postponement of orgasm]; ne treba nikad žuriti sa raspakivanjem, treba ga čak odlagati u beskonačnost. (67) [one should never hurry with the unpacking, on the contrary, one should defer it endlessly]. Pišta’s inconclusiveness is like the “obvious self-stripping of masculinity/sexuality for Kafka, and other similar waverers [and] signifies at the same time cutting through the sexual identity (and identity in general) with the signs of the Other” (Šeleva 1999: 130). However, this vagueness involves also the status of living, that is, of being alive, or dead: “it was difficult to define what was alive and what dead” (91). This is how the difference also becomes temporal and relates the questions of gender to the past. The figure of this difference, or uncertainty, is the female couple: as said, there are two almost identical women (12) who raced with Pišta. The possibility that one survived, and the other died, fuses into a single ‘neither dead nor alive’ woman: “Actually, nothing yet happened, since I hesitated, I didn’t make a decision. The girl was both alive and dead. Or neither.” (86)65 Female protagonists are either dead or absent, which could be associated with the motif of the dead beloved (that one girl he was in love with as a boy died, is also suggestive for this discourse).66 One of the conventional manifestations of this motif is the woman as the femme fatale: besides the enchanting young woman he had raced with, his mother is also described as inaccessible and impossible woman. The coupled ‘avatar’ of a woman/women indicates a possibility of the modification of the parental couple: “Every boy need his mom, even if she feeds him only with a dark chocolate. Not even one, but two moms.” (36)67 Father and what he rep65

66

67

“Zapravo, ništa se nije još dogodilo, pošto sam se kolebao, nisam se odlučio. Ta devojka je bila i živa i mrtva. Ili nije bila ni živa ni mrtva”. In one of his interviews, Tišma explains: “There is a key event in the novel, an incident on the Adriatic highway, representing the synchronicity established by the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Karl Gustav Jung” (Tišma 2014: 228). Pišta’s obsession with the (dead) bodies is also explicated as being macabre on the metanarrative level: “zar ovo što ja radim nije neka vrsta nekrofilije, pa i maroderstva. Ipak su u taj moj odnos sa tom olupinom i njenim odsutnim vlasnikom, tj. vlasnicom, uključena sva moja čula” (isn’t this a kind of necrophilia, or marauding. After all, all of my senses are involved in my relationship with that wreck and its absent owner; 85–86). “Svakom dečaku je potrebna pre svega mama, makar ga hranila samo crnom čokoladom. I to ne jedna, nego dve mame.”

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resents is apparently obsolete, while the mother should be indeed duplicated. On one hand this amplification entails self-ironic oedipal drive, on the other though, it plainly introduces a lesbian (parental) couple. It eventually expressively relates to a woman’s woman identity the protagonist aspired to: “I was for lesbianism, for pure female love.” (36)68 Women in pairs is that figure of Pišta’s exploration and quest for the answers from the past, which are at the same time answers to his sex/gender dilemmas. By entering the car wreck of a young woman who (might have) died, Pišta puts on her shell: Mene je vukla ta fascinacija, da ne kažem fiks-ideja, da je neko divno stvorenje vozilo ovaj auto koji se pretvorio u kućicu, u moje skrovište. Bio sam uljez i imao sam grižu savesti zbog toga i ne samo zbog toga, ali podnosio sam to sa naročitim užitkom, čak s radošću. (83) I was drawn by the fascination, a kind of idée fixe, that a wonderful being drove this car which turned into a little house, my shelter. I was an intruder and had a bad consciousness because of that, and not only that, but I endured it gladly, even joyfully. Unlike the absence which is constitutive to his relationship with his mother and implied in the discourse of the past, in the car he feels the presence: Onda sam ostavio kasetu otvorenu, zjapila je pomrčinom. Rupa. Kada sam se nadneo, video sam na dnu nešto ružičasto, kao neku mrlju. Imao sam utisak da me to Nešto posmatra. Ja sam bio predmet nečijeg interesovanja, nečije znatiželje. (91) [Then I left the glovebox open, the darkness gaped from it. A hole. When I leaned over it, I saw something pink on the bottom, like a stain. I had an impression this Something observes me. I was the object of someone’s interest, someone’s curiosity]; U pitanju je bio neki notes svetloružičastih korica. […] a sada sam shvatio da će još mnogo teže biti otvoriti ga, zaviriti u njegovu unutrašnjost. […] očaravajuća ružičasta boja koja me je možda podsećala na nešto što je bilo potisnuto u mojoj podsvesti i što je težilo da izroni baš ovog trena, da se rodi. (93) [It was a pink booklet […] now I realized it would be more difficult to open it, to peek into its inside […] enchanting pink colour which maybe reminded me of something supressed in my subconsciousness, which was about to surface this very moment, to be born];

68

“ali ja sam bio za lezbijstvo, za čistu žensku ljubav”.

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Pod prstima sam osetio […]. Nešto živo. (92); [Under my fingers I felt […] there was something alive]; Bilo je nečeg tako živog u tom prizoru, nešto živo je bilo sputano i ja sam ga sada oslobodio, počelo je da diše. (93) [There was something so alive in the sight of it, something alive was inhibited and I released it, it started breathing]. The motifs of a hole, pink colour, and something alive indicate the bodily presence, which is, besides a vulva allusion, an aspect of the subconsciousness the narrator explicates: it is Irigaray’s “hole, lack, error, which greets a girl on the entrance to the Symbolic where neither her libido nor her sex have the right of representation” (Jovanović 2014). In Irigaray’s own wording: “Il faudrait l’entendre comme l’impossibilité, l’interdit, d’aménager l’économie du désir (d’)origine. D’où la faille, le trou, le manque, le ‘châtrage’, inaugurant l’entrée de la fillette comme sujet dan les systèmes représentatifs.” (Irigaray 1974: 101). After the failure with the mysterious booklet, the ‘truth’ about the owner would reveal in Pišta’s dream. He dreams of opening the notebook in which he finds the message from a mysterious woman: Kao što vidiš, ipak sam preživela, ipak sam se spasla. Ja sam mala crna devojka i neka te to ne zbuni. Iako se ti sećaš neke crvenokose, utrkivao si se i sa mnom, samo koji minut kasnije, dakle, bio si učesnik u oba slučaja. Istina je da se u stvarnosti sve događa istovremeno (94) As you can see, I survived, I was saved. I am a little black maiden and don’t let that confuse you. Though you remember a red-haired girl, you raced with me only few minutes later, so you were participant in both cases. The truth is that in reality everything happens simultaneously. Pišta’s dream is subsequently deciphered to clarify the mystery which puzzles him. Though not completely distinguishing the character of the dreamed reality which might be a (self-ironic) signal of an esoteric experience, it, analogous to the novel Adio, kauboju, points up the ambiguous status of ‘realities’ (external and literary, dreamed and experienced). It also deciphers the “signifier allegory” (Biti 1997: 325), by, if tentatively, assigning ‘the signified’ its ‘signifier’. Mysterious woman explains how she actually survived and afterwards felt as if “she was re-born” (95), though she had wished to be dead before the accident. She had the Mercedes transported to his address that she found via the car registration number she found in the very magic booklet (“magična knjižica”, 95). It seems that the information Pišta was searching for led in fact back to him. What is more, the young woman didn’t drown, but survived. An indistinct motif of an alter-ego crystallizes in the moment the narrator starts speaking in the feminine gender:

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

Ali kakav sam to ja bio, ili kakva sam bila? Da li je sve bilo na svom mestu, tako da je neko ko mi se obraćao nailazio na ono što je očekivao. Ili je sve bila slučajnost, neprijatno iznenađenje. Noge umesto ruku, da ne kažem nešto banalnije. (96) But what was I like?69 Was everything at the right place, so that someone who addresses me would find what they expected. Or was it all a coincidence, an unpleasant surprise. Legs instead of arms, not to say something more banal. With clear and at the same time self-subverting humorous reference to the distinct sexual body (“everything at the right place”), a transitional sexual body – both the young woman’s and his – started appearing. Importantly, the alter-ego figure is subsequently consigned to the past time, while he is the one who continues to live, as it seems, instead of her: Ti si moje srce koje kuca negde veoma daleko od mene! Sledio je potpis: Bernarda Bernardi. Pročitavši ovo, podozrevao sam nešto, bilo je mesta najgoroj sumnji. Bernardo Bernardi nije imao ćerku. Ko je Bernarda? Bernarda-Bernardo. A/O! Osećao sam gađenje, ali i ushićenost. [...] Meni je sada bilo mnogo bitnije da se meni neko lično obraćao, u pitanju je bila sasvin posebna ženska osoba, da sam odigrao tako važnu ulogu u njenom životu i u krajnjoj liniji, bez trunke griže savesti, u njenoj smrti. Licem u lice! Taj susret tako presudan (95–96) [You are my heart that beats somewhere very faraway from me! And then there was a signature: Bernarda Bernardi. Having read this, I suspected something, there was room for worst doubts. Bernardo Bernardi didn’t have a daughter. Who is Bernarda? Bernarda-Bernardo. A/O. I was disgusted, but also excited […]. It was much more important that somebody was talking to me personally – it was a quite particular female person – that I played such an important role in her life, and finally, with having no qualms about it whatsoever, in her death. Face to face! This encounter so critical.]; To da je neka devojkica mogla da mi izvesno kaže: Ti si! Ti i niko drugi!, beše razlog ponorne tuge, padanja u beskrajno plavo O. I zašto je ona bila toliko privlačna, toliko bitna? Zato što je bila saobrazna mom liku, neverovatno je ličila na mene, jedino smo se razlikovali u boji, u nijansi. Tamo gde su bile njene ruke, bile su i moje. To se osećalo, nije trebalo niko to da mi kaže. Ona beše crna... susret sa samom sobom, sasvim malo promenjenom. I poravnanje. (97) [That a girl could have said to me: It is you! You and no one else!, was the reason of deep sorrow, of falling into the endless blue O. Why was she so attractive, so important? Because she was in compliance with my features, she unbelievably 69

Masculine and feminine differentiation in the original.

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resembled me, we differed only in colour, in a nuance. My arms where exactly in the same place like hers. You could feel that, nobody was supposed to tell me that. She was black… encounter with herself, only slightly changed. And then: synchronization.]. The hands he was wondering about are in truth his own: he appears to be the person from the past he was trying to reconstruct from scratches. Pišta and a young woman are almost identical to each other, they meet face to face, it is the encounter “with her own self”, which are all metaphors of looking oneself in the mirror. Foucault’s concept of a mirror as representing duality and contradiction, the reality and unreality of its image, follows the discourse of the alter-ego: “And just as we are about to apprehend ourselves, transcribed by his hand as though in a mirror, we find that we can in fact apprehend nothing of that mirror but its lustreless back. The other side of a psyche.” (Foucault 2005: 7). Therefore, the central episode of the novel – Pišta’s entering the car shell as an attempt to find a new home and a new body – could be read against Lacan’s “mirror’s stage”, a ‘narrative’ explaining the construction of a Freudian ego, i.e. the process of identification with one’s own specular image. Importantly, the image a child acquires does not correspond to its actual condition of vulnerability or incoordination, so “the child gains an illusory self-identity, an integrity that is predicated upon a fundamental misrecognition: the image becomes the thing. The child dons ‘the armour of an alienating identity’” (Cohen et al. 1996: 1). The ‘body’ and a ‘suit of armour’ found at the very beginning of the novel suggest exactly Lacanian outlining of the possibilities of identification: “the ego is an object rather than a subject. In other words, the ego, despite conscious senses to the contrary, is not a locus of autonomous agency, the seat of a free, true ‘I’ determining its own fate.” (Johnston 2018) Hence, self-identification enabled by the mirror stage or mirror situation is a permanent process of both difficult and rewarding self-imagining and performing: We might also conceive of the armour as an armoire, a closed space, a closet, that dooms the subject through the construction of a constricting exterior to a lifelong struggle to reconcile the ‘new’ binarism inside/outside (or self/other). We are never fully the single thing we take this armour […] to represent: the mirror stage is not a phase we pass through so much as the wooden planks upon which we enact the role of whatever character we have taken to be our essential, singular self. (Cohen et al. 1996: 1) The process of identification is fundamentally related to the other; as Lacan himself later on stressed the supporting role of fellow humans instead of the artificial reflection given by a mirror, it remains that “magistic nucleus of the ego is suffused from the get-go with the destinal ‘discourse of the Other’ – in this case, fateful significations (in Lacanese, “unary traits”) coming from caregivers’ narratives” (John-

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

ston 2018). The presence Pišta feels in the car wreck, traces of his mother, memories and fantasies about a mysterious women are his ‘alienating armour’, the other he ‘has taken to be his self’. Identity as a “necessarily alienated state – something crucial for functioning in the world but also radically unstable” (Luepnitz 2003: 225). As already written, for feminism the mirror episode represents the acquirement of femininity and the emerging female subject, being often interpreted as the allegory of the mother-daughter relationship: “the conflict in the mirror between mother and daughter, woman and woman, self and self” (Gilbert and Gubar 2000: 37). Hence, the mirror ritual “does not coincide with the Lacanian model so much as it represents a form of exchange between women in which what takes place is a kind of doubling with a difference that recalls Irigaray’s concept of the ‘two lips’ of the female imaginary.” (Andermahr et al. 1997: 167-168). The ‘double woma/en’ is a response to the reigning phallogocentricism: if a woman’s “lot is that of ‘lack’, ‘atrophy’ (of the sexual organ), and ‘penis envy’, the penis being the only sexual organ of recognized value” (Irigaray 1985: 23), the ‘two lips’ are an alternative signifier to phallus, pointing up the fact that there is no unity in the subject (Russell 2014). The subject is about plurality: “Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural.” (Irigaray 1985: 28). While this process of ‘labial’ identification constitutes “an image of dialogue, mutuality, proximity, and boundlessness as well as of cosmization” (Shands 1999: 3), a woman’s woman identity points also at Irigaray’s theme of the female autoeroticism.70 As already said, the écriture féminine theorized the position of the woman (female, feminine) inside the discourse she is structurally excluded from, or impossible to articulate herself within. A hint offered by the author himself in an interview helps establish another aspect of the search for the unknown woman from the past: “That is why the character of the classical poet Sappho is present in the novel, though almost indiscernibly; it is Pišta’s fantasy about the “little black maiden”, actually about the non-existent Bernardi’s daughter” (Tišma 2014: 229). It is curious that the young woman from his imagination is black-haired, alike his (absent) mother. The accident in which the young woman’s car plunged down the cliff reveals as a reference to one of the traditions explaining Sappho’s death as throwing herself off the cliff for love of Phaon, which is in itself an unhistorical account, one of the attempts of literary historians and Sappho’s biographers to represent her as heterosexual. The whole Adriatic coast episode could thus be the interpolation

70

“As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two – but not divisible into one(s) – that caress each other.” (Irigaray 1985: 24)

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of Sappho’s unhistorical biography. In Sappho’s figure the themes of the invisible women’s literary tradition and the suppressed homosexual love fuse. Little is known about Sappho’s life for certain: “It has become a common place among the classical scholars when asked to assess the life of Sappho to refer to the entry on her Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, edited by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig (1979) [who] devote a full page to her but leave it blank” (Rayor and Lardinois 2014: 1). An expressive comment about the history of female authorship decodes Pišta’s quest for an unknown woman from the past as his search for Sappho, an emblematic figure of the unknown or silenced women authors and their work. In her This Sex Which Is Not One Irigaray argues that a woman “enters into a ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying” (Irigaray 1985: 31). It is what the ‘female economy’ is about: “She cannot keep the border between the discursive ‘I-s’, she is forced to transgress the lines [and] precisely in the permeability of the borders Luce Irigaray sees the main quality of the female economy, defined by the lack of feeling for possession and property.” (Jovanović 2014). Pertaining Irigaray’s argument Tišma explicates the main themes of the novel: consumption and tenderness. He explains that: “the first is the purchase (furniture set), the second is tenderness (Sappho, that is, little black maiden)” (Tišma 2014: 206-207). Irigaray theorizes precisely this relationship between property and nearness as essential in explaining female sexual economy: Ownership and property are doubtless quite foreign to the feminine. At least sexually. But not nearness. Nearness so pronounced that it makes all discrimination of identity, and thus all forms of property, impossible. Woman derives pleasure from what is so near that she cannot have it, nor have herself. (Irigaray 1985: 31) Being ‘near, but not possessing’ is the depiction of Pišta’s final transformation, associatied with jouissance and the (im)possibility of signifying an experience in language: There are two crucial topics of the novel: the first one is the fear of being alone, and the second is the quest for the jouissance. Pišta Petrović, the protagonist, though seemingly not ready to change his life, gradually does change, the life, that is, the text guides him. In the end he arrives to the threshold of transformation, but he stops there. The essential transformation is indescribable. It is the moment of absolute uncertainty which can’t be discussed, one must remain silent about it. Symbols are frail and can’t satisfy us. (Tišma 2014: 206-207) Being the distinguishing feature of the écriture féminine, the writing of the ‘impossible’ “shows that the desire ensuing due to ignorance is at heart of the language activity” (Čale Feldman and Tomljenović 2012: 68). This activity materializes over the feminine (libidinal) position of writing: “My writings really have no raison d’être. Folly, madness! In fact, I know nothing: I have nothing to write except what I don’t

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

know.” (Cixous 1991: 35). Pišta (as the autofictional narrator) reproduces the feminine position of writing as “writing the fundamental longing or the desire for one’s own self as the difference” (Tišma 2014: 220).

VI 4.

Colonizing a Utopia: Jouissance, Difference and Authorship Ženska homoseksualnost mi je pak mnogo zanimljivija, otvorena je prema univerzumu, prema zvezdama, ona je kao muzika. [...] Svet bez muškaraca, možda je to naša budućnost. (Slobodan Tišma)71

Culmination of the story begins with the previously mentioned episode of the eviction, which marks the end of life under the father’s, albeit provisional, protection. Once his flatmates and he are forced to move out, Pišta brings nothing with him for there was no single well-kept item in the flat anyways, and it was all ready “for the garbage dump” (“za smetlište, za otpad”; 71). Also, he finds the next day the front door of the flat on the garbage. Since there was no belonging space to be closed any longer, it is a ‘non-door’, comparable to the constitutive traits of the car wreck and the furniture set. Nevertheless, the variation of the garbage theme could be found in Pišta’s accounts on his youthful hygienic habits. He, namely, rarely washed himself, but the dirt, in the situation of his ‘anatomic’ lack and the lack of the mother, felt as a surplus: “Simply, the dirt was comforting. The smell of dirt was always something irreducible, something different.” (20)72 Pišta’s subsequent declaration: “I was a specimen of rejects, human waste.” (22)73 , though relying on the pejorative idiomatic should be read affirmatively, and is already a signal of his future experience of the jouissance. For, jouissance is both “opposed to ‘lack’” (Maccannell 1998: 185), and seen as the “surplus value of an object or property”74 (ibid.). His difference is the one producing “the excess of the communication noise, the excess of meaning, and what is the worst and the most dangerous, the excess of pleasure” (Rosić in Radović 2005: 184). Pišta’s general favouring of the contaminated and impure substances, continuous reports on the garbage spaces, the feces, reluctance

71 72 73 74

Female homosexuality is much more interesting; it is open to universe, to the stars; it is like music. […] A world without men, maybe that’s our future. (Tišma 2014: 229) “Jednostavno, štroka je bila uteha. Vonj štroke je bio oduvek nešto nesvodivo, nešto različito. Dragoceni višak!” “bio sam primerak škarta, ljudskog otpada”. Italics added for emphasis.

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to washing, ragged clothes, finally his decision to live inside a car wreck, should be all read as the nearness of an excess. His “undefined state” (“ovom nedefinisanom stanju u kom sam bio”; 31) indicates the idea of an identity as something impure and outside a hierarchy, on the verges of the semantics of remains, bits and pieces on the garbage dump. The garbage trope has been also used to address the simultaneously negative (devaluation) and positive (non-hierarchic) status of the objects of the past: “You can get that at a kilo price, you can find that chair on every dump […]. The more valuable, the cheaper, the price drops!” (67)75 The figure of garbage indicates the heterotopic space of the present not only as a deflated remnant of the past, but as the ‘container’ of that past.76 Heterotopia could be understood as ‘temporal space’ integrating hitherto unbridgeable differences and discontinuities between the present and the past, as in Foucault’s metaphor of the mirroring images, two at the same time ‘similar’ and ‘dissimilar’ objects: “The relation of emulation enables things to imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other without connection or proximity: by duplicating itself in a mirror the world abolishes the distance proper to it; in this way it overcomes the place allotted to each thing.” (Foucault 2005: 22) Read in this way, past and the present can switch places, thus inevitably giving up on their temporal sovereignties, but also producing a novel type of a heterotopia. The final episode is preceded by a crisis culminating in the already analysed episode with selling Bernardi’s room to a dealer who pays with counterfeit money. The theme of the furniture sale is expressly forged as the protagonist’s maturation: in Pišta’s dream before the collector’s arrival and his offer to buy the furniture, he dreams of Bernardi’s daughter turning eighteen and Bernardi himself who wishes to buy the set. However, after the transfer the next day, Pišta ends up in prison once he tries to exchange the counterfeit note in a bank. The mother, who initially comes to inform him that his father died, comes to prison and verifies Pišta’s identity, helping him to go out. Without his mother Pišta would remain “closed”, “trapped”, “underground”, “in prison”, or in the car wreck, described as the ‘egg’ he eventually comes out of. Pišta’s statement: “I was free” (103) marks the beginning of his eventual sex and gender emancipation (or maturation), which is at the same a comic parable of liberation, while the reunion with the mother is a self-ironic 75 76

“ima toga ovde na kilo, čak na svakom smetlištu možete naći taj stolac […]. Što je nešto vrednije, to je jeftinije, cena je manja!” A literary device of a catalogue in its variations (a garbage, a warehouse, a list) is an emblematic element in the works of (post-)Yugoslav authors: Dubravka Ugrešić, Danilo Kiš, Daša Drndić, Olja Savičević Ivančević, Miljenko Jergović, David Albahari etc. who all locate it within the discourse of the past and remembering. Moreover, Yugoslav Neo-avant-garde artists, particularly those associated to Belgrade Mediala (Leonid Šejka as a prominent example) were typically interested in “warehouses, junkyards, and garbage dumps, bringing a convergence with the ideas of ‘junk art’ (the art of the junkyard)” (Šuvaković 2003: 28).

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

reminder of the Oedipal attachment of the son to the mother: “Aaaaaand finally there was mom. They found her.” (102)77 Not only did the mother rescue him from prison, but she authorized Pišta’s admission into a women’s commune. She invites him to the commune she was a member of for years after leaving their home, informing him also that her partner had left and that there are only women living on the farm now. After he accepts, she guides him on his way to the mysterious place. Once they get off the bus and are taken further into the wilderness by a taxi, the uncanny account of the initiation unfolds. Their way to the farm is depicted as the rite of passage, consisting of the classical ritual stages of purification, cleaning and transforming. Once they reach the cottage the women dwell in, the mother hands him over to the two older women: Shvatio sam da su one egzekutori, i da će me one razapeti, tj. položiti na krst. Biću go i sve će se videti, moj polni minimalizam, tj. bespolnost. Divno! O tome šta sam doživeo na krstu, ni reči. Iako me ništa nije bolelo, ipak kao da sam osetio čavle, kao da mi je bio zabijen klin, samo jedan... u grudi, u samo srce, a zatim izvađen. Bio sam probušen. Ona stvarčica, ne znam kako već da je nazovem, pokrenula se među mojim nogama. Uzbuđenje je raslo, a zatim sam klonuo. Nešto je kapljalo dole na krst. Suze?! (110) I realized they were the executors, and they were about to crucify me, namely, lay me down on the cross. I will be naked and everything will show, my sex minimalism, to be exact, my sexlessness. Wonderful! No word about what I experienced on the cross. Though I felt no pain it was as if I sensed the nail, as if a single nail was hammered into me… in the chest, in the heart, and then taken out. I was pierced. That thing, I don’t know how to call it, moved between my legs. The excitement rose, and then I slumped. Something was dripping down on the cross. Tears?! Women in the commune complete a performance of crucifixion on him, laying him on the cross inside a five-pointed star. In the ritual which stages both a castration and involves signs of devirginating, the protagonist resolves an oedipal complex by, as it seems, transitioning into a woman (he is also given women’s clothes to put on after he wakes up). The Oedipal phase, “entirely centered on and structured around the signifier phallus, the emblem of the Father, right, and the Law” (Althusser 1996: 27) is resolved into a new state, a “non-phallic masculinity” (Rosić 2014: 305), related to the “sexlessness”, as the characteristic of the female sexuality.78 A ‘womanly sex77 78

“I i i i i i najzad se pojavila mama. Pronašli su je”. Describing the furniture the narrator says it is “womanly sexless”: “On je samo stvorio onu sobu, nameštaj koji je bio ženski bespolan i koji je kao takav mogao biti predmetom moga obožavanja.” (He only created that set, the furniture which was womanly sexless and which thus might become the object of my veneration. 88)

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lessness’ bears upon the earlier argument about the impossibility of essentializing the female sex, leading to a more fundamental assertion that “femaleness is not sexuality” (Solar 2012: 130). The performance of ‘female transition’ functions as a reversed process of the ‘feminization’, a de-masquerade, taking off the mask of femininity, as for Lacan again “female sexuality as masquerade is […] masking a lack, pretending to hide what is in fact not there” (Russo 1997: 330). Unlike the femininity as “a mask which masks non-identity” (ibid.), here identity is eventually established by putting on the mask of desexualized femininity. This insisting on the asexuality of women appears to be an attempt to think the difference outside the discourse of oppositions, of polarity: Pišta aims to eliminate the difference softly, to recognize the femininity outside the polarity, which is in fact futile. There is solely the masculinity as the bearer of the signifying practice […], masculinity prescribes the femininity which remains passive […]; by choosing the femininity he simply wishes to avoid any identity. (Tišma 2014: 219) Corresponding to Irigaray’s plurality of the female subject, under the mask of a woman we can see “neither one nor two. Rigorously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person, or as two. She resists all adequate definition.” (Irigaray 1985: 26) Also, the ‘crucifixion’ itself involved pleasure – the ‘thing’ moved between his legs, the excitement raised – approaching a “jouissance [as] a sort of laicised transcendence” (Kristeva 1997: 209). Verification of this obvious ‘homecoming’ is completed by another latently erotic scene in which he shoots from the air gun into the target together with “three graces”: “Hitting in the centre, yes! What I was always missing.” (112)79 The lack (“missing”) permits hitting in the centre, a precise metaphor of the protagonist’s gender teleology: his womanly lack had helped him reach the goal. While the father’s narrative spreads onto the past and a vanished home(land), the mother’s projects onto the future, to the space beyond the melancholic memories. This new territory – a modification of a female utopia – is the protagonist’s final destination. He does not only start living with the women, he is one of them, he becomes the woman’s woman. The female commune is staged as a heterotopia, a space “of an alternate ordering” (Hetherington 1997: 41), a ‘place of Otherness’ (ibid.: 42). Heterotopia as the space of identification necessitates the materiality of the body, as the original meaning of the word ‘heterotopia’ also “comes from the study of anatomy. It is used to refer to parts of the body that are either out of place, missing, extra, or, like tumours, alien.” (Hetherington 1997: 42). Not only that Pišta’s corporeal condition and an attempt to alter it follow this logic of the ‘alien body’, but the analysed 79

“Pogađati u centar, to! Ono što mi je oduvek nedostajalo.”

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mirror episode as the encounter with his alter-ego reveals the heterotopic capacity of the situation, suggesting that the identity is always that of the other: “There is something in the emulation of the reflection and the mirror: it is the means whereby things scattered through the universe can answer one another.” (Foucault 2005: 22). While this ‘answering’ could be read as an identification process, it is also, as already said, a communication between the present and the past. What is more, the course of identification is constitutionally related to the recollection of the past, indicating also the way literature deals with the shadows of the past, but also those of writing, and the writer him or herself: By writing I always construct, create my autobiography, I in fact attempt to live the desire, that is, the text desires me, the difference desires me, which is why the text is credible […]. By writing we deal with the litter we collected at the literary dump. Post-literature is not concerned with the history or the world, but with its own self. No, it is not even concerned with itself, but with its shadow, a phantom,80 its corpse, since literature, like the arts in general, is dead. The arts are a huge garbage dump. A post-writer is the one who rakes through garbage. (Tišma 2014: 221) By recapping the garbage topos, Tišma describes the writing as negotiating its own shadow, not a hollow space, but the space of ‘the other’ – be it even a phantom – who occupies it. While I will come back to the ‘phantom figure’ in the concluding chapter, here the fact that the narrator’s female other is constituted in the process of his/her writing about the past should be highlighted. By putting on the shell of the former owner, Pišta ‘occupies’, that is, ‘is occupied’ by the body of a woman. Therefore, to be identical to the other appears to be the target of his exploration: “Body is always alien, it belongs to someone else. The souls wander. Therefore, it is the story about a metempsychosis, about a migration and rebirth, as it were, about occupying.” (Tišma 2014: 230) Moreover, writing, as an autofictional and self-referential activity is also a space of the heterotopic import: “This is the main principle of a heterotopia for Foucault: as sites – and these can be textual just as much as geographical ones – they bring together heterogeneous collections of unusual things without allowing them a unity or order established through resemblance.” (Hetherington 1997: 43) Not to allow a unity, to always remain the ‘difference’ (the difference which desires the writer) is both an authorial and an identity claim. Not only that without an error the text is impossible, but the mistake in the Order is the very source of a life jouissance: Greška je nešto što nastaje u odnosu na vladajući poredak, remeti ga i nikada nije stvar slučaja. Kako!? Kakav je smisao remećenja? Greška je pobuna, subverzivna

80

Italic added for emphasis.

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delatnost, najintimnija, najličnija stvar: grešiti spram samoga sebe, stalno se samodestruirati. Bez toga nema u-žitka, nema postojanja. Propadanje, kvarenje vodi osvešćivanju. Hm, hm, hm? Stalno pripuštati ludilo, nered, ali po malo. Postoji šansa! Dakle, treba grešiti, treba remetiti. Eto, tako sam razmišljao izlazeći iz bioskopa. Koješta, ali pomislio sam. (118) A mistake is something that arises against the ruling order, it disturbs it and is never accidental. How come!? What is the point of the disturbance? A mistake is the rebellion, a subversive activity, the most intimate, most personal thing: erring against oneself, always self-destructing. Otherwise, there is no jouissance, no existence. Decay, deterioration leads to awareness. H’m, h’m, h’m? Always letting in the insanity, chaos, but little by little. There is a chance! But, it’s necessary to make mistakes, to disturb. These were my thoughts as I was leaving the theatre. Nonsense, but it was what I was thinking. Maintaining the ambivalent status of his claims, the narrator suggest also Roland Barthes’ concept of jouissance, which denotes both the enjoyment and orgasm, and is hence “related to desire [but is also] an impulse incapable of final satisfaction, since desire is always displaced and displacing” (Graybeal 1990: 17). Joussiance is the “agonized joy of the self-relation, of self-creation, of self-observation” (ibid.), paradoxically constituted on “dissolution, displacement, shattering” (ibid.). Jouissance is the name of the protagonist’s physical experience (the performance of transition – the crucifixion), separation from his (original?) body, the acquisition of a new one, intertwined (and confused) with the experience of an orgasm (“the excitement rose, and then I slumped”). But also, “the root experience of jouissance is that toward which all language, […] all creation are directed” (Graybeal 1990: 17). Kristeva’s semiological explanation of becoming a subject establishes a “link between meaning and subjectivity in the matrix of the literary text” (Wardi 2000: 2). The lack experienced by the protagonist propels his own reconstruction along the writing of the literary text. This enables seeing the process of identification – reminiscent of the protagonist’s progressing in Savičević Ivančević’s novel – as the (Kristevan) process of becoming the author: The subject’s psycho-semiological being is founded on a lack that is associated with the archaic separation from the maternal. This lack – ultimately of a secure sense of being – propels and animates the subject’s constitutive significations. Motivating his conscious as well as his unconscious representations, it gives rise to fantasies of origins that are projected back onto the subject’s immemorial beginning. The representation and enactment of these fantasies indeed constitute the origin of the subject both in his ‘original’ advent – and in the actuality of its reconstruction in the poetic text. (Wardi 2000: 2)

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Besides the “immemorial beginning” and “the archaic separation from the maternal” which evoke the previously discussed symbolic bond between the Ocean and the archetypal figurations of the mother, the cited definition of the subject corresponds to Pišta’s understanding of his own autonomous personality constituted by the jouissance: Da li sam bio ličnost? Da li me je neko cenio? Ma, postojale su mnogo važnije stvari. U-žitak je bio jedino bitan, a da li se on delio sa nekim? Pa, naravno da nije, čak pored najbolje volje, čak ako bih to nedvosmisleno želeo. Za mene je to bila najdublja intima, ono samo moje i ničije više. (55–56) Was I a person? Did anyone appreciate me? Oh well, there were other more important things. Jouissance was central, but was it to be shared with someone? Well, of course not, with the best will, even if I would undoubtedly want it. It was the most profound intimacy for me, what belongs only to me and no one else. However, besides allowing the protagonist to come close to, or even experience the jouissance, the woman’s woman as an identity suggests also an ‘inheriting of’, or ‘continuing’ a tradition. The woman’s woman as the figure of the tradition of the women’s writing helps discover unwritten histories of the late Yugoslav and postYugoslav literatures, offering one possible answer to the question ‘what do to with the past?’.

VI 5.

Neo-avant-garde and Feminist Foundations of post-Yugoslav Literature The [avant-garde] texts are clearly oriented towards the future which authorizes the possibility to revaluate the past and deny the present. (Aleksandar Flaker)81

The final women’s commune episode can’t be read outside the literary connection Tišma establishes with another Neo-avant-garde Vojvodinian author Judita Šalgo and her novel Put u Birobidžan (Journey to Birobidzhan, 1997).82 Judita Šalgo (19411996) is one of the most captivating authorial figures of the Yugoslav Novi Sad art scene from the beginning of the 1960s to the mid-1990s. Publishing her first poetry 81 82

Flaker 2009: 57. The material and the argumentation from my article “Neo-Avant-Garde and Feminist Underpinnings of Post-Yugoslav Literature and its Utopias: A Comparative Reading of Judita Šalgo and Slobodan Tišma” are in part used in this subchapter.

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collection Obalom (Along the Shore) in 1962, Judita Šalgo continued experimenting with poetic language and staging her performances throughout the 1970s and 1980s.83 One of the Neo-avant-garde textualist poets, she wrote poetry as a performative textual practice, while her performances explored the role the (female) body played in the production of the text. In 1987 her novel Trag kočenja (Skid Mark) came out, and in 1995 the collection of stories Da li postoji život (Is There Life). Put u Birobidžan is, like the later manuscript Kraj puta: završetak romana Put u Birobidžan (The End of the Journey: The Completion of the Journey to Birobidzhan, 2004), published posthumously.84 Though the Kraj puta has been published as an epilogue of the Put u Birobidžan, offering the possibility of ending an open-ended journey of the protagonists, I will analyse here Put u Birobidžan and the link Tišma establishes with it – or that he enacts – notwithstanding this possibility of a closure. For, this ‘open closing’ corresponds to the structural characteristics of Judita Šalgo’s literature, and her conceptualization of a utopia. The theme of the novel Put u Birobidžan is an attempt or a desire to reach a utopia, which unfolds in the two major directions: the Jewish family Rot bond to the (historical?) Birobidzhan, and the journey of Bertha Pappenheim (Freud’s Anna O.) to an imaginary Birobidzhan, the female continent. While the ‘sequel’ of the Put u Birobidžan offers some answers about the destinies of the Rot family, the finding of a female continent has been left without a conclusion. This analysis focuses on the impossibility of reaching the desired place, or reaching it yet, that is, on the journey itself whose end is “everywhere and nowhere” (Šalgo 1997: 104). Read in this way, the journey of Bertha Pappenheim would be accomplished more than a decade later, when Tišma would write the end of his own novel, in which the protagonist seemingly unexpectedly ends up in a female utopian commune. The closure of Bernardi’s Room could be seen as the arrival to the future, “invented” by women in the first place (Šalgo 1997: 143). Hence, ‘reading in reverse’ reveals the necessity of this arrival, but equally the necessity of reading the post-Yugoslav fiction within the traditions of Yugoslav literature. What marks the writings of the two authors, and is related to the protagonists’ search for a utopia, a female commune or a continent in both of the novels, is the ‘conceptual investigation’ of the text, a part of their avant-gardist, conceptual poetry practice: “poem was separated from its traditional lyric foundation and was established as a material, textual proving ground for sensory, topological, graphic,

83 84

Poetry collections: 67 minuta, naglas (67 Minutes, Out Loud, 1980), Život na stolu (Life on the Table, 1986). Literary critic and author Vasa Pavković has, together with the author and Šalgo’s husband Zoran Mirković edited both of the manuscripts for publication. Other posthumously published works: Jednokratni eseji (Disposable Essays, 2000), Hronika (Chronicle, 2007), Radni dnevnik 1967–1996 (Work Diary 1967–1996, 2012).

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and conceptual investigation [dealing] with the shift from poetry as creation to poetry as research” (Djuric 2003: 92). Similar techniques were developed in the avantgarde Russian novel from the 1920’s, built in a way which is ‘de-constructive’ to the fable. Besides opposing the continuous fable activity, “based in the willing activity of the psychologically motivated characters [the] constructivist novel exposes its own structure, makes it visible” (Flaker 2009: 142). The self-reflective strategies of writing opened the possibilities of “creating ‘possible worlds’ [which are] necessarily anti-essentialist and emphasize the open-endedness of human activity” (Punday 2003: 123). Besides the already suggested heterotopic aspects of their female communities, a utopian imagination of these two authors brings their variation of a utopia closer to an ‘a-topic’ space, an avant-gardist conception of an ‘optimal projection’ that Aleksandar Flaker theorized as a possibility which is beyond the spatiality and totality of the concept of utopia. This makes the optimal projection a suitable figure in the process of defining the space of the post-Yugoslav literature, as I would show next. The attempt to reconstruct the continuities among the Yugoslav and postYugoslav literatures is also an effect of the status of the Neo-avant-garde as a “hidden, censored, supressed, misunderstood, banned, indeed forgotten” (Šuvaković 2003: 5) epoch. The Neo-avant-garde in Yugoslavia is defined both as a revival or a continuation of the prewar avant-garde artistic practices, and as an independent artistic response to the political and cultural state of affairs of the time: [N]eo-avant-garde in Tito’s Yugoslavia happened between 1951 and 1973. It began as a continuation of the prewar modernistic and avant-garde practice on the margins of the dominant socialist culture […]. The authentic neo-avant-garde of the 1950s was born as a gesture of defiance against social realism and bourgeois modernism by projecting the eventual space of the art experiment and overstepping the traditional media boundaries of art disciplines. (Ibid.: 27)85 In the same volume on the Yugoslav avant-gardes Dubravka Đurić maintains that the Yugoslav Neo-avant-garde art was “not a revision or a revival of avant-gardes between the two wars, but an authentic, existential response to the ideological, cultural, and artistic demands of the 1950s and 1960s” (Djuric 2003: 82). Miklós Szabolcsi classifies the Neo-avant-garde movements as those which “in some way represent the manifestations of the revolt against the capitalist system, or are the coloured forms of consciousness” (Szabolcsi [Sabolči] 1997: 88). The Novi Sad artists

85

Šuvaković precisely dates the period he defines as the post-avant-garde in Yugoslavia: it refers to the group of phenomena in conceptual art (1969-1971), eclectic postmodernism (1981-1986), and the retro-avant-gardes (1981 to now); Šuvaković 2003: 32.

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and actionists unquestionably produced nonfictional, self-referential texts and textual experiments as “a provocative breakthrough from the poetic world of the autonomies of language into the world of ‘material-linguistic production’ in a battle for meaning and emancipation” (Djurić 2003: 92). Šuvaković also defines the Neoavant-garde as, among other features, involving different conceptualisations of a utopia and the deconstruction of the cultural gender regimes: Neo-avant-gardes were transgressive, experimental, and emancipatory practices conceived in terms of reconstruction, recycling, or revitalization of specific legacies of historical avant-gardes, foremostly Dada and Constructivism. Additionally, neo-avant-gardes were specific, however marginally positioned, realizations of grand modernist and avangardist technological, emancipatory, political, and artistic utopias and hopes. They featured authentic critical, excessive, experimental, and emancipatory artistic practices in a […] not-yet-decentered masculine order of historically determined public domination of one gender over the other/s. (Šuvaković 2015: 31)86 Tišma in his novel resumes those principal aspects of the Neo-avant-garde, which are, besides its experimental and critical outlook, the utopian imagination and the assault on the ‘historically determined’ gender patterns and institutions. Furthermore, it was the Vojvodinian literary Neo-avant-garde that affected the Yugoslav scene by the “decentralization of its essential Ljubljana-Belgrade axis” (Kopicl 2003: 102). This shift is attributable to the three authors originally coming from the Vojvodinian town of Zrenjanin, but later moving to Novi Sad – Vujica Rešin Tucić, Vojislav Despotov and Jovica Aćin – who published the important collective work Pamphlets in 1968. The Zrenjanin, Subotica, and Novi Sad Neo-avant-garde developed through literary textual experiments, concrete and visual poetry (Vujica Rešin Tucić, Vojislav Despotov, Judita Šalgo) and the “paratheatrical, and textual practice of conceptual art” (Šuvaković 2003: 28). Among others, textualists (Judita Šalgo), and groups Januar and Februar, Bosch+Bosch, KôD and (Ǝ (Slobodan Tišma, Miroslav Mandić, Slavko Bogdanović, Vladimr Kopicl) were active in textual experiments as well as in processual and conceptual art in the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s.87 Judita Šalgo was the director of the cultural centre Tribina mladih in Novi Sad at the time Tišma and his group were active. Yet, since the whole ‘movement’ was seen as a political threat to the establishment, by the 1971/1972 Šalgo was dismissed, and some of the members even ended up in prison. The prison Pišta ends up in is reminiscent of this period of the 1970s and 1980s when, if not exhibiting around 86 87

Italics added for emphasis. Information about the poetics, actions and programs of the Vojvodinian Neo-avant-gardists is collected from Miško Šuvaković’s texts (see Bibliography).

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the world, “the Novi Sad literary neo-avant-gardes and art paradigms […] sit in jail” (Kopicl 2003: 2108). Tišma has stressed the influence Tribina mladih and the whole cultural ambiance had on him, highlighting the importance of Judita Šalgo as the director of the centre. This very context stirred his avant-gardist imagination: “Once I joined the Tribina mladih my views changed fundamentally: I became avantgardist […] I use my experiences of an avant-gardist and experimenter.” (Tišma 2014: 168) Techniques and figures in Bernardi’s Room could be decoded by the Neo-avantgardist code.88 References to Tišma’s artistic productions (roughly 1968–1989) are disseminated along the course of the novel’s plot. The cube/square is an important figure in the novel, not only as a bearer of a perfect sublime form, but as the refrence to Tišma’s conceptual art. One of the most well-known of Tišma’s actions, Kocka (Cube, 1970), as well as his poetic-conceptual text Kvadrat-dimenzija greške (Square – Error Dimension, 1970) which “confronts the (anti)symbolism of Malevich’s Square with the language of the graphic and visual sign” (Kopicl 2003: 105) are revisited and actualized through the network of complex geometrical symbolic, gathered in the Bernardi’s room as the central narrative object: U samo središte sobe, poslagao sam sve komade i prekrio ih belim plahtama, da ne pada prašina po njima. [...] Takođe, čitavu gomilu sam uvezao tankim konopcem, upakovao sam sve to lepo u jednu celinu, tako da je ličilo na neko modernističko umetničko delo. (19) In the very center of the room I heaped all the pieces and covered them with the white cloth, to preserve them from the dust. […] Also, I wrapped the whole pile in thin rope, I packed it all nicely in a single whole, so that it resembled a modernist piece of art. Both the furniture and the room it was placed in are repeatedly described as white: the room is painted in white (41), the furniture is wrapped in a white cloth (42), like a “white mountain” (46). They replicate the problematic of Malevich’s painting White on White (1918) and its Suprematist geometrical abstraction. The introduction of Bernardo Bernardi – as a historical figure, one of the pioneers of the Yugoslav post-war modernist architecture and design who drew strongly on the avant-garde traditions – might be a part of the answer to a dilemma about the artistic abstraction and functionality inscribed in the furniture, but also an answer to principal questions of art practice. Bernardo Bernardi was the member of the Exat 51, a group of painters and architects “who presented a living connection to the activist heritage of the historical avant-garde” (Ceraj 2013: 99) and who desired to transfer the 88

The names of the art groups containg a word ‘code’ might be suggestive: there were three in the period 1969–1973: KôD, (Ǝ , and briefly a common (Ǝ-KôD.

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constructivism and abstraction into the reality. In their manifesto they assert that they “see no difference between so-called pure and so-called applied art; the Group intended to operate in actual time and space, assuming plastic requirements and potentials as a tentative point of departure” (Djuric and Šuvaković 2003: 539). Suggestively, it was the Exat 51 that “founded geometric abstraction and a constructivist utopia” (Šuvaković 2003: 27). Furthermore, an illuminated inscription, a possible name of the commune the protagonist sees hanging above the entrance in a building inside the female commune – Aesthetics – is a textual replica of a photograph action by a member of the KôD group Mirko Radojičić who photographed the illuminated advert of the construction company (1970). The performance itself, but also its citation in the novel, allude to the practices of the ready-mades of Duchampian Dada (but also Russian constructivism), which “contest the bourgeois principles of autonomous art and expressive artist, […] through the embrace of everyday objects and a pose of aesthetic indifference” (Foster 1996: 2). The aesthetics of the objects – predominantly the room – is also perceived as an alienated projection of the traditional, or bourgeois art. That is why the fact that the furniture set and a car wreck are the ‘mechanically reproduced’ objects prevails: “an ‘aura’ of uniqueness, privilege, distance and permanence [is replaced] with a plurality of copies [allowing] the beholder to encounter the work in his own particular place and time” (T. Eagleton 2002: 58). Furthermore, the sea figures as an important symbol in the text as either the Adriatic (the Yugoslav sea) or as the denser, already examined symbol of an Ocean. Slobodan Tišma’s and Miroslav Mandić’s performance More – Antimore (Sea – AntiSea) in front of the cathedral in Novi Sad in 1970, is another ‘action quote’ expounding the motif inside the novel’s story.89 In one of his interviews, Tišma offers some clues on the possible allegoric character of the male commune in the father’s flat: “For those who were not ready to be initiated into the world of men, the world of fathers, the only way out was in the so called subcultural space. In the 1960s and 1970s it was called the ‘underground’. Therefore, a kind of an underground afterlife. You died, but you live” (Tišma 2014: 174). So, the collapse of the male commune and Pišta’s intentional withdrawal from society could be seen as a variation of the dynamics between the mainstream culture, as a masculinist and patronizing space, and a subcultural space in which the Novi Sad artists of the time operated. The metaphor of afterlife can be similarly read in the perspective of Pišta’s journey to a mysterious remote commune and his initiation into the ‘world of women’. Moreover, for all of this to take place, the initial refusal of the conventions imposed through a familial and societal life must have taken place: “the [avant-gardist] artist is the anarchist who destroys the societal values” (Šuvaković 2012: 525). Together with substituting commune for family 89

Information about the KôD actions: Šuvaković 2012: 525; 2008 (see Bibliography).

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life, the Neo-avant-gardist demand to transgress the border dividing the art and reality activates projects of concrete utopias, a possibility of “different existence” (Šuvaković 2012: 557). ‘Radical communities’ emerge as adaptations of an avantgardist utopia: Political actionism and neo-anarchism are important characteristics of the group KôD and it transgression of the borders between the arts and existence. Complexity of the political thought, actions and attitudes of the group KôD could be described in terms of the new sensibility of the 1960s, completing of a utopia (of the last avant-garde) […]. The new sensibility engendered critical concepts about a creation of a commune as a radically different living community, transformative to all basic relations of the emotional, sexual, social and proprietary defining of the micro- and macro-living. (Šuvaković 2012: 533) Hence, the women’s commune from the novel mirrors the commune founded by the members of the groups KôD and (Ǝ in a house in Novi Sad in 1973. Curiously, the commune was four years later transferred by one of the members (Božidar Mandić) to the mountain of Rudnik in eastern Serbia.90 Nevertheless, it appears that the female commune in the novel associates the concept of the ‘optimal projection’ more than that of a utopia, making at once visible the distinction between the heterotopic aspects and that of the optimal projection which ‘project into the future’. As a matter of fact, Aleksandar Flaker offered a bold new definition of “the avant-garde as an art practice based on an optimal projection” (Šuvaković 2003: 26). Though the Neo-avant-garde could be seen, as already stated, as a movement distinct from the prewar avant-gardes, its contextualization within the historical avant-gardes, the possibility of seeing it as “a rehearsing of the first avant-garde, as a maturation” (ibid.), enables the application of Aleksandar Flaker’s concept of the optimal projection on the Neo-avant-garde artistic projects. According to Flaker, “the ‘optimal projection’ does not mean an ideally structured future space, nor does it even attempt to define it. Rather, it means movement as the choice of an ‘optimal variant’ within the prevailing reality” (Djurić and Šuvaković 2003: xv). Therefore, the optimal projection contradicts the utopian demand for a certain form of spatiality, favours instead the movement, openness, and contradicts firm, and hierarchized structures: The concept of ‘optimal projection’ does not denote the same as ‘utopia’. The original semantics of ‘utopia’ means a ‘place’, that is a ‘land’ which does not exist, and those texts that theorized a utopia as a rule defined it as a closed, delineated

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Mandić “founded a rural commune in the village Brezovica on mountain Rudnik that could be considered, at least in the first period of its work, a spiritual adherent of the group KôD.” (Šuvaković 2012: 530). The commune still exists under the name Porodica bistrih potoka.

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space with the ideal social structure contrasted to actual societal relations91 . Precisely this type of structure, confined by a ‘wall’ and hierarchized, is negated by Zamyatin in his dystopian novel We, and the obvious scepticism towards a firmly structured space of the future […] characterizes a utopian closure of the comedy Bedbug (Klop) from 1928 by Mayakovski. (Flaker 2009: 58). Flaker’s conceptualization of the optimal projection corresponds to an indefinite, undecided character of the female commune in Bernardi’s Room’s, supported also by Tišma’s already quoted account of the impossibility to transpose a situation of the protagonist’s transformation: “The essential transformation is indescribable. It is the moment of absolute uncertainty” (Tišma 2014: 206–207). Often humorously depicted occurrences in the commune also ridicule the utopian idealism. The episode of the ‘crucifixion’ is a pun on the mainstreaming of the avant-gardist art: performance representing the crucifixion on the five-pointed star is a persiflage of one of the well-known performances by Marina Abramović – Rhythm 5 – carried out in the Student Cultural Center (SKC) in Belgrade in 1974. Supposedly intended to test the limits of the mental and physical, it ended in artist fainting inside the burning five-pointed star due to the lack of oxygen. Hence, Tišma’s gesture simultaneously evokes the practices of the Yugoslav Neo-avant-garde and mocks their affected subversion. Moreover, the optimal projection relates to the non-essential home depicted in Bernardi’s Room: both the car wreck and the peculiar female community are not really about a place, but about a ‘choice of an optimal variant’. Also, the motion (as a possibility suggest by the car) is what defines this avant-gardist imagining of the future, and its perpetual self-subversion. Representative avant-gardist texts, as Aleksandar Flaker suggests, are opposing a utopia: ‘Optimal projection’ does not signify an ideally structured space of the future, it does not even strive to define it, it rather signifies the motion as choosing the ‘optimal variant’ in prevailing over reality [...]. In essence, in its representative texts the Avant-garde is the opposite of a utopia, and rejects any reification of ideals, permanently making its own individual poetic choice, thus changing its own strategy. (Flaker 2009: 59) Hence, unlike the emptied and alienated traditional aesthetic, “the optimal projection presence in the future” (ibid.: 57) is the very concept enabling the “fundamental function [of the avant-garde texts which] is the aesthetic revaluation associated with societal functions of the ‘moral, ethical and social revaluation of the whole system of the existential relationships’” (ibid.).

91

Italics added for emphasis.

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In Judita Šalgo’s novel Put to Birobidžan the conception of a haven – drawing on the historical Birobidzhan, an autonomous region for the Jewish people in the Soviet Union – transforms into a sanctuary for the ill (syphilis infected) women, prostitutes, deprived women, and eventually – all women. The novel narrativizes the finding/founding of a female continent, a women’s utopia, over the story about Bertha Pappenheim’s travel to the Balkans and the Middle East, in search for the female continent. On her way she spends some time in Budapest’s hospital “for venereal diseases, therefore, exclusively for prostitutes” (Šalgo 1997: 71), drawn to go further to the south-east by a rumour that there is a movement or “the state of mind” anticipating a “utopia of the great global refuge for women, the Female continent” (ibid.: 66).92 The initial mention of Birobidzhan is set within the ‘genesis’ of the Jewish Rot family, whose members will also become the protagonists on Bertha’s journey, and their fundamental relationship to Birobidzhan as both a historical and a symbolic haven would be revealed.93 The record of the family history narrativized in the Old Testament rhetoric concludes in the present time, in the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia. That all the flights at the Belgrade airport have been cancelled is a telling detail, while Birobidzhan reappears as a possible – yet equally imaginary – asylum for a Rot family member: “It is difficult to predict how important would Birobidzhan be in the future, but in the times of great tremors when worlds swoop down to the past, nothing else is there anyhow.” (Ibid.: 16)94 Unlike the disintegrating homeland of Yugoslavia rushing into war, Birobidzhan is “a land without killing [...]; an ideal city (utopia) [...]; a spare homeland” (ibid.: 63)95 . The story soon retrospectively draws back to the beginning of the century, Bertha’s visit to Belgrade and her acquaintance with the Rot family, converging for the most part the feminist aspects of her quest and of the utopian Birobidzhan. Judita Šalgo’s work and this novel in particular occupy an important place within the late Yugoslav feminist and Neo-avant-gardist arts. Quite a few researchers have already dealt systematically with her work, while the expression “female continent” started circulating as a figure of the women’s writing, women

92 93 94 95

“za venerične bolesti, dakle, isključivo za prostitutke”; “jednim pokretom ili stanjem duha [...] utopijom o velikom, globalnom pribežištu za žene, Ženskom kontinentu”. One of the suggestive details is that the name of a charcater in Šalgo’s novel, one of the Rot family members, Olga Rot’s husband is Pišta. “Teško je predvideti šta će u budućnosti značiti Birobidžan, ali u vremenima velikih potresa kada se svetovi obrušavaju u prošlost, ništa drugo i ne postoji.” “zemlja bez ubijanja [...]; idealni grad (utopija) [...]; rezervna domovina”.

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authors, and feminist literary criticism.96 Furthermore, both the Birobidžan and its author assume an almost cult status, particularly in the field of the feminist literary theory, focused on the revaluation of Šalgo’s work.97 Nevertheless, a critical ‘tribute’ to the Birobidžan in literature is in Tišma’s Bernardi’s Room, constructed as a multiple reference to Judita Šalgo’s book. The last episode of Tišma’s novel in which the protagonist reaches the female commune is the locus of the interdiscursive play with the Birobidžan, establishing a connection between the ‘mother’s’ commune and a utopian female continent. Judita Šalgo constructed a narrative about a female utopia on the psychoanalytical theory of hysteria and the medicinal discourses that influenced it. The psychoanalytical theory Šalgo appertains to is relevant as one of the most prominent discourses of the feminine, which is why it has been thoroughly questioned and ironized in the novel. The novel in reality responds to the idea, “found in Hippocrates and discussed by Plato, of the wandering womb the extraordinary belief that the uterus, when deprived of the health-giving moisture derived from sexual intercourse, would rise up into the hypochondrium (located between the stomach and the chest) in a quest for nourishment” (Rousseau 1993: 118). Precise imagination of the ancient medicine foreseeing a route of the uterus is in the imagination of Judita Šalgo transformed into a quite unpredictable journey: “Woman wanders through life the way the womb wanders inside the woman’s body” (Šalgo 1997: 77)98 . While the protagonist Bertha herself feels like a womb wandering inside the body (ibid.: 105), there is a possibility or a (historical?) moment “when the womb gets tired and stops, [and] a woman herself continues traveling” (ibid.: 90)99 . Therefore, a “fanciful geography of hysteria” (Rousseau 1993: 118) is in Birobidžan converted into the expansion of the women’s quest for their territory, inseparable from the quest – and a claim to – their own bodies and voices. And so, while the wandering womb is the figure representing and securing women’s alleged biological and corporeal limits, in Šalgo’s story women follow their womb to set free, to separate and reach their own land: “A continent discovered by the women guided by their uteri.

96

97

98 99

An anthology of the Serbian modern stories written by women by Ljiljana Đurđić is named Ženski kontinent (Female Continent, 2004); Vladislava Gordić Petković’s book of essays on women authors is entitled Na ženskom kontinentu (On the Female Continent, 2007). See Bibliography. One of the researchers coins the term “Šalgology” (šalgologija; Todoreskov 2014: 38). Together with a number of shorter articles and essays, the two systematic studies on the work of Judita Šalgo have been recently published: Silvia Dražić: Stvarni i imaginarni svetovi Judite Šalgo (2013), and Dragana Todoreskov: Tragom kočenja: prisvajanje, preodevanje i raslojavanje stvarnosti u poetici Judite Šalgo (2014). “Kao što materica luta u telu žene, tako žena luta kroz život.” “kada se materica umori i zastane, onda sama žena nastavi i krene na put”.

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A promised land which one reaches [...] by excess, through a hysterical messianic cry, revolt and spasm, a scream.” (Šalgo 1997: 94)100 The listed symptoms of hysteria do not relegate women to the realm in which they remain mumbling and powerless, but quite the contrary, they are signs of a riot, a possibility of articulation and production of their own speech about themselves. Though Anna O.’s identity had been suppressed, and Freud had never even met her, by conveying “meaning with her body” (Cixous) she contributed to “psychoanalytical theory and technique” (Hunter 1997: 258), meaning not only that Bertha herself produced “the knowledge of the unconsciousness” (ibid.), but that she engaged in the language alternative to the symbolizing practices of the phallocentric discourse. In this way her discourse approximates the spaces of what would later be dubbed the écriture féminine, the ‘writing of the body’: “Irigaray urges us to understand how woman’s sexuality can be translated into a language which might seem to operate in a nonlinear, antilogical way.” (Conboy et al. 1997: 10) Bertha is the one inventing the ‘talking cure’, while the men (Bruer and Freud) afterwards theorized what she had in fact performed. Hunter offered a psychoanalytic-feminist interpretation of Bertha’s behaviour and her alleged inability, which in fact represented her refusal to use the conventional speech. Bertha wished to liberate from the “integration into a cultural identity [she] wanted to reject” (Hunter 1997: 260). Bringing attention to the active role Anna O.’s suppressed and silenced sexuality and her revolt against the patriarchy had for the creation of the psychoanalytical discourse is, therefore, related to the modern feminist reclamation of hysteria seen as “feminism lacking a social network in the outer world” (Israël in Hunter 1997: 272). Yet, the possibility of reaching a female continent in Šalgo’s novel – regardless of its unfinished story – remains open. A female continent is a matter of speculation, an intention, or even a belief, and not necessarily a materialized reality: “If/when the female continent is discovered, it will be, it is, an emotional fact – the truth of emotion.” (Šalgo 1997: 151)101 . However, the ambiguity – inscribed not solely in the discourse of the psychoanalysis, but in the very feminist writing of the story102 – paradoxically enables the discourse of utopia: “If there is anything certain, that is Birobidzhan.” (Ibid.: 174)103 For, this ambivalence is not only a sign

100 “Kontinent što ga žene otkrivaju vođene svojom matericom. Obećana zemlja u koju se stiže [...] ekscesom, kroz histerički mesijanski plač, protest i grč, krik”. 101 “Ženski kontinent (kada se/ako otkrije) biće, jeste emocionalna činjenica – istina emocije.” 102 Tatjana Rosić wrote about Šalgo’s distrust or the deconstruction of the “psychoanalytical, feminist, narrative of the national/Jewish identity, the Holocaust narrative, post-colonial narrative” (Rosić 2006a: 270). Yet, on the other side, Beleslijin detects “three very important receptive fields in Judita Šalgo’s fiction generally: the imagological sphere of Judaism, the gynocritical sphere of reading as a woman and reading about the woman with the possible upgrade to queer reading.” (Beleslijin 2013: 734). 103 “Ako postoji išta sigurno, to je Birobidžan”

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of a disillusionment, it is a constitutive element of a non-essentializing discourse, existing parallel with the themes of belonging and identity, and a female commune on a remote island as their central figure. Though corresponding to the conceptions of a literary utopia as a remote island, Judita Šalgo’s female continent is designated as the ‘motion’ (Flaker). It is, indeed, the “movement” or “the state of mind” (Šalgo 1997: 66), whose ‘final destination’ is always moving away, deferring. Bertha’s goal is “a moving target, a moving, fleeing homeland, wandering, promised land” (ibid.: 104)104 . The remote island is an optimal projection into the future, indicated also by the elusiveness of its physical characteristics: “because it is already anticipated that in that land no form, colour, maybe not even a name could stabilize” (ibid.: 152)105 . Importantly, the just and egalitarian world of the island would be a mere consequence of frivolity, and not of a perfected humanist ethics (ibid.)106 . Šalgo assesses utopia negatively, for it is, as she expands, a materialization of an idea that excludes the in-between as an inherent characteristic of what Flaker described as the “actual societal relations” (Flaker 2009: 58): “Utopian thinking is puritan: it does not allow duality, coexisting as a woman and a human being. Utopia is irrevocably discriminative; it seeks for perfection, or nothing.” (Šalgo 2000: 171)107 For this reason a utopia for Šalgo remains an object of speculation, of imagining a better, or a new, even impossible world, and not an “ideally structured space of the future”, a “reification of ideals” (Flaker 2009: 59): “A vision must be inhabited swiftly, one must organize a life in it, turn it into an image, a clear idea, if necessary – a fixed idea – a durable and solid object of imagination.” (Šalgo 1997: 101)108 That a utopia is the ‘solid object of imagination’ matches Šalgo’s vision of it as a place outside history, which is both a deliberately defeatist refusal to participate in the history of late and dissolving Yugoslavia, and a possibility of an alternative: “The significance of utopia is perhaps in a person’s aspiration to somehow attain happiness past main historical roads and ruptures, past history all together.” (Šalgo 2000: 173)109 Šalgo’s conception is compatible with Marcuse’s theorizing of utopias as “historical possibilities [which] must be conceived in forms that signify a break rather

104 “Pokretna meta, pokretna, bežeća domovina, lutajuća, obećana zemlja.” 105 “jer se već sluti da u toj zemlji neće moći da se ustali ni jedan oblik, boja, pa možda ni jedno ime”. 106 “duboki smisao površnosti, lepa i lekovita sreća”. 107 “Utopijska misao je misao čistunca: ona ne dopušta dvostrukost, istovremeno bivanje ženom i ljudskim bićem. Utopija je nepomirljivo diskriminativna, ona hoće savršenstvo ili ništa.” 108 “Treba viziju hitro naseliti, organizovati život u njoj, pretvoriti je u predstavu, jasnu ideju ako treba – i fiks-ideju, trajan i čvrst predmet maštanja.” 109 “Smisao utopije valjda i jeste u čovekovom priželjkivanju da sreću dosegne nekako mimo glavnih istorijskih drumova i lomova, uopšte, mimo istorije”.

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

than a continuity with previous history, its negation rather than its positive continuation, difference rather than progress” (Marcuse 1970: 65). Šalgo’s ‘negative utopia’ is also a response to the collectivism immanent to a utopia. Instead, solitude and isolation – integral also to Pišta’s ‘life-style’ – are constitutive to this alternative ‘better place’: Sada znam da je sloboda u odricanju, povlačenju, sada shvatam, jedina utopija vredna nastojanja, života, jeste utopija krajnje izolacije, odricanja od pozitivne utopije. Utopija potpunog usamljivanja. (Šalgo 1997: 154) Now I know that freedom is in refraining, in a withdrawal, now I understand, the only utopia worth the effort, worth the life, is a utopia of the extreme isolation, the renunciation of a positive utopia. A utopia of the complete solitude. Nevertheless, this seemingly defeatist attitude could be read as a separatist proposal, a possible radical alternative to the patriarchal and authoritarian society made not only through a reproductive labour of women, but whose very social reproduction is dependent on the naturalization and instrumentalization of gender: Mislim da žene treba da odustanu od borbe. Treba da se povuku na pusto ostrvo, na pusti kontinent o kakvom šapuću, sanjare one hiljade luetičarki ujedinjenih tela i umova, mislim da žene treba da napuste svetsko bojište, da pobegnu, povuku se iz istorije, da odbiju da rađaju. Žene treba da pokažu ni manje ni više kako mogu da zaustave, promene svet. (Šalgo 1997: 153) I believe women should give up the fight. They should leave to the deserted island, deserted continent which is already in the murmurs and dreams of those thousands of the syphilitic whose bodies and minds unified, I believe women should leave the world’s battlefield, they should flee, withdraw from history, refuse to reproduce. Women must show how they can stop, how they can change the world. On one side, these conceptualizations of a utopia could be defined by a constitution of the post-avant-garde which is “opposed to the avant-gardes (idealistic utopia) and the neo-avant-gardes (concrete utopia), [and is instead] a posthistoric complex of manifestations that reexamines, presents, destroys, deconstructs, thereby creating an archaeology of modernism, avant-gardes, and neo-avant-gardes.” (Šuvaković 2003: 30). On the other, a separatist, radical proposal of a female society reflects conceptual but also historical spaces of the female and feminist countersociety: [T]here are more radical feminist currents which, refusing homologation to any role of identification with existing power no matter what the power might be, make of the second sex a countersociety. A ‘female society’ is then constituted as a

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sort of alter ego of the official society, in which all real or fantasised possibilities for jouissance take refuge. […] the countersociety remains the only refuge for fulfilment since it is precisely an a-topia, a place outside the law, utopia’s floodgate. (Kristeva 1997: 208) Besides the feminist communal spaces projected into the future, languge itself is activated as the space of the feminist exploration and play. A peculiar dialogue among Birobidžan and Bernardi’s Room develops around the lettering and meaning of the letter ‘O’ and ‘A’ (capitalized in both of the texts). These almost unnoticed details originate in the authors’ “topological, graphic, and conceptual investigation” (Djuric 2003: 92) and “neo-Wittgensteinian metalinguistic games” (Kopicl 2003: 105). In Birobidžan the ‘O’ inscription is explained as the attempt to understand the secretive ‘O’ in Anna O.’s name: To O, to jaje prapočetka, sadrži u sebi sve bolesti i sve lekove, polazišta i ciljeve, ono je meta, nulta zemlja, početni i završni kontinent [...]; žena-Odisej, prva ženalutalica [...], okultno [...], orgazam… Ime Ana O. jeste sinonim velikog, svetskog (vasionskog) histeričkog kruga (iz kojeg nema izlaza). (Šalgo 1997: 103) That O, the egg of the origin, contains all the diseases and all the cures, starting points and objectives, it is a target, land zero, initial and last continent […]; woman-Ulysses, the first woman-wanderer […], the occult [...], orgasm… The name Ana O. is the synonym of a great, global (cosmic) hysterical circle (with no way out). In Bernardi’s Room the symbolic of ‘O’ is repeated and variated: it represents the egg of the primeval origin, a target, the occult, orgasm, an ocean: “beše to razlog ponorne tuge, padanja u beskrajno plavo O.” (that was the cause of an abyssal sorrow, of falling into an endless blue O. 97).110 The symbolism of the ocean is also a reference to the very novel Birobidžan, which opens with a poem about a capsule of memory wandering around the world, from one ocean to the other. The ocean(s) might be also interpreted as the historical time, an opposition to eternity and a sign of ephemerality. Though it is an elusive symbol, it clarifies the figures in Tišma’s novel by disclosing their link to the discourse of the maternal (oceanic mother) and hysteria, i.e. femininity (“hysterical circle”). The ‘goal’ of the protagonist Pišta’s

110

The figure is also an allusion to (and a pun on) a well-known line “Beskrajni plavi krug i u njemu, zvezda.” (An endless blue circle and a star inside of it) from the novel Seobe (Migrations, 1929) by the avant-gardist writer Miloš Crnjanski. Interdiscursvity of the Bernardi’s Room arguably assumes Crnjanski’s sumatarism (an avant-garde movement he grounded, based in the beleif in the cosmic harmony), but also the theme of migrations, as a possible theme of Tišma’s novel, explicated in one of the earlier quoted interviews.

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

quest, his reaching of the mysterious female commune materializes the assumption that “[e]very journey is a hysterical attack” (Šalgo 1997: 94).111 An indescribable transformation he undergoes corresponds to the “essential, profound ignorance” (Šalgo 1997: 104) allowed through the hysterical ecstasy (ibid.).112 Šalgo’s affirmative reading of hysteria continues in Tišma’s narrative as the jouissancce, both a joy and always ‘displacing desire’ (Graybeal 1990: 17). At the same time, it is inseparable from the creation and creativity in themselves, involving also the “dissolution, displacement, shattering” (ibid.). Moreover, a key figure of a hysterical journey is a ‘double female protagonist’: in Birobidžan a young woman Bertha encounters in Belgrade – a Rot family member Flora – is the one imagining and desiring to travel to the “Land of women”, that is she is the one believing that Bertha does travel to the anticipated destination.113 Without her reflections, the imaginary journey would most probably maintain its historical coordinates (the biographical journey of Bertha Pappenheim to the Balkans and the Middle East). The chapter with which Put u Birobidžan closes, and that begins Kraj puta – Šuma mučenika (Forest of the Martyrs) – ends in an elucidation of a female utopia, or what could be dubbed a women’s optimal projection. If the aim of the ‘projection’ is to end the suffering, the goal would keep on distancing, but if a woman wishes to “reach the impossible dreams, the closeness would come closer, all the objectives would become available […], every Birobidzhan real” (Šalgo 1997: 175; 2004: 35)114 . This explanation suggest the already analysed disbelief in a historical, or real utopia – arguably alluding to the promised land of both the Jewish and the Yugoslav peoples.115 Yet, another fragment identifies the possible space of women’s dreams, projections, travels, as both the ironic conclusion about the actual ‘space of women’ – where their “actual societal relations” happen and which for good confines them inside – but, also as a ‘given’ which has to be operated and subverted from within. It is Flora who articulated this duality: [Ž]ene i kada sede nepokretne za trpezarijskim stolom očiju uprtih u tanjir i kada trčkaraju tamo-amo između kuhinje i trpezarije, one u stvari putuju, kruže, noge ih same nose ka cilju koji ni njima samima nije poznat (Šalgo 1997: 91) even when they sit motionless at the dining table and stare at the plate, and when they run around between the kitchen and the dining room, women actu111 112 113 114 115

“Svako putovanje je histerički napad.” “kroz histeričku ekstazu se doseže suštinsko, duboko neznanje”. “Flora veruje da je Berta Papenhajm ta koja putuje u Zemlju žena” (Flora believes that Bertha Pappenheim is the one travelling to the Land of women. Šalgo 1997: 91). “nedostižne snove dohvati, blizina će se još više primaći, svi ciljevi postati dostupni […], svaki Birobidžan stvaran”. The misfortune arrives when the (Jewish) people “bond to one country” (“vežu za jednu zemlju”; Šalgo 1997: 159).

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ally travel, circle, their legs alone carry them towards the goal, unknown even to themselves.116 The whole women’s literary tradition could be seen as ‘the discourse of the hysteric’, maybe unexpectedly reflecting the ‘double’ spatiality of the household, of the private. While hysteria has been recognized as “an expressive discourse” by the surrealist artists Aragon and Breton (Hunter, 1997: 272), and then later revisited by French feminist theoreticians and Julia Kristeva in particular, who in fact directly associated the Avant-garde art and the écriture féminine, Juliet Mitchell construes that the ‘discourse of the hysteric’ is marked by the woman’s concurrent acceptance and refusal of a specific ‘woman’s world’: I believe that it has to be the discourse of the hysteric. The woman novelist must be an hysteric. Hysteria is the woman’s simultaneous acceptance and refusal of the organisation of sexuality under patriarchal capitalism. It is simultaneously what a woman can do both to be feminine and to refuse femininity, within patriarchal discourse. And I think that is exactly what the novel is; I do not believe there is such a thing as female writing, a ‘woman’s voice’. There is the hysteric’s voice which is the woman’s masculine language (one has to speak ‘masculinely’ in a phallocentric world) talking about feminine experience. It’s both simultaneously the woman novelist’s refusal of the woman’s world – she is, after all, a novelist – and her construction from within a masculine world of that woman’s world. It touches on both. It touches, therefore, on the importance of bisexuality. (Mitchell 1990: 101) The ‘woman’s masculine language’ – maybe another possible answer to Felman’s question – could be a code of reading the letter ‘A’ in the ‘letters puzzle’ in the two novels. Suggesting the difference between the masculine and feminine grammatical forms,117 the letter ‘O’ is in Bernardi’s Room accompanied by a letter ‘A’: “The signature followed: Bernarda Bernardi […]. Who is Bernarda? Bernarda – Bernardo. A/O!” (95–96).118 The word play indicates Pišta’s sexual and gender suspicion, but also the linguistic regime which imposes distinctions on the bodies that waver. Yet, since Bernardi’s imagined daughter appears to be the narrator’s alter-ego, the male-female binarism manifest in the language has been transformed into a (literary) ‘bisexuality’, a necessary discourse of the woman novelist. The more so, of a woman’s woman novelist.

116 117 118

Indicating a utopia as a dualistic, open and finally impossible space/project, Flora reappears in the Kraj puta as an older woman, prostitute and a returnee from the concentration camp. ‘A’ is the feminine, while ‘o’ is the typical masculine ending of the declinable word classes in Serbo-Croatian. “Sledio je potpis: Bernarda Bernardi […]. Ko je Bernarda? Bernarda – Bernardo. A/O!”

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VI 5.1.

Appendix: Situationist International and the Esoteric Neoavant-garde in Bernardijeva soba

Some of the key motifs, the protagonist’s actions, as well as his worldview, are informed and inspired by the programmatic and literary texts of the Situationist International.119 The Situationist International had a great influence on the Vojvodinian conceptual artists: The Parisian ‘Situationists’ were our role-models, we even travelled there to meet those people. They dubbed the art the street actionism, a kind of a provocation of the urban everyday life, an attempt to change the perception of the common people, passers-by. We did similar things on the streets of Novi Sad. (Tišma 2014: 186) One of the light-motifs – the Ocean – appears as the signal of the very connection among Tišma and the Situationist International. The motto of Bernardi’s Room “Pozdravljam te, stari Okeane!” (I salute you, old Ocean! 217)120 is the verse from Lautréamont’s work Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror, 1869). Lautréamont was one of the most cherished authors and influences on the French Symbolism, but also Dada and Surrealism, and finally the authors of the Situationist International, themselves drawing upon the avant-gardist traditions, in particular that of Dada. The ocean as a knotty complex of different imports is not simply a place: “Still it is inconceivable that the Ocean – pure ice and fire – can be a place.” (75)121 The figure of the ocean embodies a “feeling” of something “timeless”, which incorporates both the disputable metaphysical essence, the ‘origin in the maternal’, but also the tropes of freedom and rebellion as they were articulated in Lautréamont’s work: “What matters in Bernardi’s Room is the ‘oceanic feeling’, as something timeless.” (Tišma 2014: 217) Situationists considered the car to be a necessary ‘companion’ of a modern man (“To have a car!”): “A car is a mobile little house, it connects lodging with travelling, which is controversial […]. The phenomenology of that object is truly marvellous, it ultimately marked the whole 20th century […]. It is a metaphor of our freedom, absolute independence, but also loneliness and horror.” (Tišma in Vujičić 2011) A wrecked car is certainly neither a real home, nor a vehicle, paradoxically embodying a home which “never is and never can be a factual space, but only a metaphysical

119

Information about the work, activities, programmatic texts by the Situationist International are mostly taken from the volume: Situacionistička internacionala (edited by Aleksa Golijanin, 2008). 120 Ocean is also the motif in one of La Strada songs (Okean). 121 “Ipak, neshvatljivo je da je taj Okean, koji je sam led i vatra, neko mesto”.

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form, space of the eternal desire, unreachable, uninhabitable, impossible” (Šeleva 1999: 134). In her afterword to the 2011 edition of the Bernardi’s Room Maja Solar points out the Situationists’ influence on Slobodan Tišma, particularly their relationship to the city and their desire to influence the very urban space as a stage of the everyday life where a revolution can happen (Solar 2012: 126).122 Pišta’s reluctant attitude towards the idea of joining his mother in the rural commune is a Situationist gesture. Nevertheless, the interest for the urban and the city as the embodiment of its possibilities draws on the avant-gardist mythical conception of the city: the streets, the city and its exteriority acquire an objective/object substantiality which enables their independent existence. The Situationists’ interest in the everyday life in the city has its roots in the avant-garde vision of the city as a revolutionary space: Within the process which led from Modernism to the Avant-garde, urban spaces increasingly assumed mythical meaning: The City and The Street as the space of the urban motion divested themselves of the teleological meaning (city as the habitation, street as the road traffic) and acquired characteristics of the ‘objectively given substantiality’ independent from the humans […]; a human became susceptible to the city as the monster of the modern era, while The Street as the bearer of the motion assumed a particular meaning: destructive and catastrophic, thus associating with the eschatology – expectation of changes, right up to those revolutionary ones. (Flaker 2009: 110) Yet, what distinguishes the Situationist International from the traditional Left is their anarchist and ludic call for the refusal to work (Šuvaković 2012: 583). The fact Pišta does not work “in the system of the alienated work is the destabilizing of the whole system. The protagonist is the one who does not work, that is, the one who lives, who wants to be permanently inspired” (Solar 2012: 128). Being a ‘mistake in the system’, Pišta performs and lives the ultimate demand of the jouisssance, the joy of life itself. By doing this he combines the Situationists’ demand, a Debord’s graffito “Ne travaillez jamais!” and a non-consumerist idle strolling down the streets, representing a contemporary flâneur.123 While not to work is the ultimate demand, boredom is considered by the Situationists to be counterrevolutionary. Tišma responds in his introduction to the book of his interviews: “I also hope that they wouldn’t be bored, for I think in literature and in arts in general there is no worse sin than boredom. Ha? The decasyllabic meter!” (Tišma 2014: 5–6). 122

123

Their interest in architecture of the modern city and its (im)possible transformations, together with the concept of ‘psychogeography’ have, following their avant-garde predecessors, fundamentally influenced and transformed the discourse of urban spatiality. The ambivalence is, however, presereved: the Situationists’ view of commodities as representing the actual absence of authentic desires which are substituted by consumption, enable seeing Pišta’s admiration for his precious objects as the picture of his tedious life.

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

The anarchic ‘lifestyle’ of Pišta’s, his refusal of any authority or conventions of the familial, social, or cultural traditions, together with his disregard for success, is comparable to the Situationists’ ideals. People living in Pišta’s flat are like him, outcasts, losers, hobos, the “humiliated and insulted” (27). The only successful one in the group, the so-called “seventh man”, didn’t end up in the flat, as a refuge for the marginal, “the miserable” (72). He only briefly resided in the flat, but later left and became a successful writer (56). Comparable to Marija Čarija in the novel Farewell Cowboy, Pišta is somewhere between a solipsist speaker and a street preacher, an agent of the unconventional behaviour, and a social taboo: “They obviously didn’t mind me walking down the street and talking to myself. On the contrary, it was appealing. They recognized me as one of them.” (27)124 As the narrator further elaborates, a democrat (the politician, representative of the ruling class) is mostly afraid of the anarchy of the ‘lunatics’: “A democrat doesn’t fear fascism, but anarchy, he fears bums. Why not allow lunatics to hold office?” (34)125 The insane, idle and the poor are a single class of people living on the margins: in one of the final scenes in the novel Pišta encounters a poor family on the traffic light, concluding that the cold is the worst enemy of the poor (118). A curious alchemical symbolism complex in the novel takes also from the esoteric affinities of Tišma’s Neo-avant-garde group KôD, who were “interested in the esoteric, from studying hermeticism to anthroposophy” (Šuvaković 2012: 541). The discourse of alchemy is the narrator’s expressive tool of conveying the symbolic of the events in the novel. Mother is the protagonist’s assistant, his guide on the path from prima materia (the moment of facing an inner self, an inner Other) to the individuation. Pišta also believes in magic (20), which is yet another signal of affinity with his mother. His personal “something to do” (“zanimacija”) is “alchemy, ancient science, but also witchcraft and sorcery in general” (21)126 . The dark chocolate his mother feeds him is associated with the alchemical substance nigredo. He was not only allowed to eat the chocolate, but it was the only food his mother would ever provide. He basically ate squares and small cubes which later in his stomach transformed into an amorphous mass: Uvek sam preferirao sladak ukus, zapravo, slatko-gorak, opora slast koja je bila rezultat kušanja geometrijskih oblika, pravougaonika, kvadratića, kockica, zapravo njihovog poništavanja, pretvaranja u amorfnu masu koja je završavala duboko u mom stomaku. (36–37)

124 “Njima očigledno nije smetalo što idem ulicom i razgovaram sam sa sobom. Naprotiv, to ih je čak privlačilo. Prepoznali su me kao svog.” 125 “Ne plaši se demokrata fašizma, nego anarhije, plaši se mangupa. Zašto ludacima ne bi bilo omogućeno da budu na političkim funkcijama?” 126 “alhemija, drevna nauka, ali i veštičarenje i vračanje uopšte”.

247

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I always preferred the sweet taste, actually, a sweet-bitter taste, acrid sweetness which was the result of tasting the geometrical forms, rectangles, little squares, little cubes, in fact, of their annihilation, transformation into the amorphous mass which ended up deep in my stomach. Nigredo is the alchemic state of being decomposed, ‘the blackness’ symbolized by the chocolate, the feces, Pišta’s dirt, the black coat from the final episode and a black substance it dissolves into. Their waste-form, a matter dissolving is equivalent to the prima materia, the basic element preceding any form. The nigredo represents the first step on the way to the philosopher’s stone, the creation of gold, in Jung’s theory the moment the individual “confronts the shadow within” along the process of individuation. (Hopcke 1999: 163) The earlier mentioned “bezimeni čovek”, the “no-name man” dwelling in Pišta’s flat – always silent and secretive – could be a figure of the inner shadow, the alter-ego the protagonist encounters on his path of individuation. Pišta’s ignorance – the logic behind his deferral of information about the man – marks his state of pre-maturity. Hence, the key figure of identification, his female alter-ego is illustrative of the kind of maturity he needs to achieve: his individuation is the transitioning to, or integrating with his woman’s woman counterpart. The episode with the black coat his mother sewed for him has been already mentioned to illustrate sexual and gender identity as something not only chosen, but never fully decided. The coat eventually dissolves in the closet after not being worn, exposed to the work of moth. Yet, the disintegration of the coat doesn’t appear to be the vanishing, but the transformation into the prima materia again. The quality of this kind of transformation is illustrated in another ‘alchemic’ situation when the dog’s feces transforms into something precious (37) and Pišta concludes: “Gold is shit and shit is gold.” (38)127 The goal of the alchemic venture, the stone of wisdom which would turn a metal into gold is equal to feces, meaning not only that the nigredo state is a necessary in the process of (an alchemic) advancement, but showing also that the hierarchies are relative, and that the matter is one and the same, at least for the true alchemist: “Berlinič always claimed that it is hard to accept the fact that the matter, in this case chocolate, decays, that its transforms into nigredo, into shit, even if it were only a deception.” (38)128 The narrator applies the alchemical reasoning in studying the moral conduct, and while the usage of the everyday idiomatic helps him avoid the pathos, the effect of this fusion is comical: Svaki ljudski stvor je kad-tad mogao spasti na nivo govneta ma koliko bio sladak (38) 127 128

“Zlato je govno i govno je zlato”. “Berlinič je tvrdio kako je teško prihvatljiva činjenica ta propadljivost materije, u ovom slučaju čokolade, njeno pretvaranje u nigredu, u govno, makar da je to samo privid.”

6 Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba

[Every human being could sooner or later sink to the level of shit no matter how sweet they were]; Pre bih i pojeo pravo govno, nego da ‘jedem govna’, makar to bio način da jednom postanem sladak (39) [I would rather eat real shit, than to ‘eat shit’129 , even if that were a way to finally become sweet.]. Finally, prima materia is in alchemy symbolized by the square or the cube shape. In this novel the symbolic of this shape and geometry in general is very elaborate, associated with the motifs of the booklet130 , chocolate cubes the protagonist eats, abstract oneiric geometric forms: “So, I hit the nail, he hits the plate131 , I hit the black square, he hits the white, which followed in succession fleeing into infinity, until I finally woke up.” (46)132 Arguably also influenced by the Pythagorean mathematics, the motif of the square or cube is materialized in the two fundamental objects, the car-wreck and the Bernardi’s room. That they are both rectangular is their most remarkable quality. They spread out as the sublime geometric objects: “Furniture was in the form of a strict geometrical abstraction, and the abstraction of the cube dominated” (17)133 . Pytagorean mathematics of proportion and metaphysical world explains how it is possible for Pišta to hear the “furniture singing”; Harmony of Spheres is heard through the Bernardi’s room: Za mene je muzika bila sve. Ja sam čak i Bernardijevu sobu osluškivao, nameštaj je pevao, svaki komad je imao svoj motiv, svoju ariju koja se uklapala u opšte sazvučje, u vrhunsko biće garniture, slaveći tako postojanje tog umetničkog dela na samoj obali Okeana. (60) For me music was everything. I was even listening to Bernardi’s room, the furniture sang, every piece had its own motif, its own aria which fit into the general harmony, into the superior being of the set, thus celebrating the existence of that work of art on the very shore of the Ocean.

129 The idiom meaning: “to bullshit, speak rubbish”. 130 “Ta knjižica je bila nekakav lik. Možda ništa ljudsko, samo jedno geometrijsko telo.” (That booklet was a figure. Maybe nothing human, just a geometrical body. 91) 131 The idiom meaning: “to get one’s lines crossed”. 132 “I tako, ja u klin, on u ploču, ja u crni kvadrat, on u beli, koji su se nizali bežeći u beskraj, dok se najzad nisam probudio.” 133 “Nameštaj je bio u formi stroge geometrijske apstrakcije sa dominirajućom figurom kocke”.

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VII Conclusions. Inherited Possibility, Or: Choosing The Optimal Variant

This research was initiated as a kind of a search for a literary utopia of ‘today’s Yugoslavia’ and it soon turned into the uncovering of the existing ‘landscapes’ of the post-Yugoslav literary field. This useful analytical concept supported the thesis about the actual impossibility of the (officially proclaimed) discontinuity, as the field infers interconnectedness and relationality of all the activities and actors constituting the respective field. Nevertheless, the description of the field involved also its temporal marks: without one particular relationship towards the past, the literature of this field is difficult to imagine. This particular relationship – already summed up several times in Boris Buden’s arguments about ‘performative addressing of the historical praxis’ – involves as well ‘counting on’ the future. Moving in the direction of the Yugoslav past as a ‘better past’ and a clear “utopian-humanist vision of socialism” (Drndić) is what is preserved and ‘brought up to date’ in Post-Yugoslavia, as its permanent and formative element. Again, this motion is the backside of the desire to prevail over reality and protrude, project ourselves onto the future: “choosing the ‘optimal variant’ in prevailing over reality” (Flaker). Moreover, searching for the female continent inside post-Yugoslav literature – in an attempt to conceptualize its feminist spaces – resulted, or, more precisely, it culminated in distinguishing the connection between the post-Yugoslav literature and the Yugoslav Neo-avant-garde. The histories and historicization of Yugoslav avant-gardes, their “elusive and impossible” status, and a project of their failed integration into the dominant discourse of national cultures in Yugoslavia (Šuvaković) informed this process. Post-Yugoslav literature could be seen as a successor of this Yugoslav artistic “second line” which remained outside the cultural mainstream; similar to the way Yugoslav avant-gardes are defined by their impossible histories, post-Yugoslav arts and literary production are elusive and impossible.

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The awareness of the presence of the avant-gardist traces1 makes possible the reading of post-Yugoslav fiction outside or at least next to the common critical and cultural perceptions. Though I only touch on this topic and don’t carry out a full treatment of it here, what has become clear is that the themes of exile, migrations, (post-)national literature, melancholia and nostalgia – as some of the topoi of the post-Yugoslav literature – could be re-contextualized in regard to the avant-gardist, or most dominantly, Neo-avant-gardist literary traditions. Whereas it has been already included in the critical vocabulary and in the authorial poetical explications, the Neo-avant-garde expands the possibilities of understanding and defining – and finally, historicizing – post-Yugoslav literature.2 Hence, seen from this perspective, ‘representative’ post-Yugoslav novels and their imagery could be read as a reflection and communication of avant-gardist discourses and stylemes, starting from the avant-gardist fiction of one of the post-Yugoslav prime movers Dubravka Ugrešić. Bora Ćosić’s work is mostly read against his critical writing about socialist Yugoslavia and the autobiographical experience of exile, while a glance at his work within the Yugoslav Neo-avant-garde would in reality open a much broader space inside of his post-Yugoslav opus. Ćosić’s reprints of the dadaist magazines Dada Tank and Dada Jazz in the Neo-avant-garde “pro-Fluxus magazine Rok” (Djurić and Šuvaković 2003: xvi) in 1969 were in fact “in many respects decisive for the Yugoslav Neo-avant-garde and post-avant-garde scene” (Kopicl 2003: 101). Luka Bekavac in his recently published text on Ćosić’s Tutori (Bekavac 2017) highlighted these aspects of Ćosić’s work, thereby actually revealing some of the procedures of his own writing. Daša Drndić’s reconstruction of the bygone times, that unlike the nostalgic Yugoslav narratives relates the past in which people were murdered and disappeared in the Holocaust, is narrativized over the figure of a flâneur: “Ulice vode flaneura u nestalo vrijeme, kaže Benjamin” (streets take the flâneur inside the lost time, says Benjamin; Drndić 2009: 267). Describing the Stolpersteine as marks of absent and invisible past, the autofictional narrator appears as the flâneur of the

1

2

“In Derrida’s account, every supposedly ‘present’ element originally and essentially contains the traces of other elements that are supposedly ‘absent’: nothing, therefore, is ever wholly present or absent” (Bradley 2008: 150). Telling examples of the discursive status of the Neo-avant-garde would be in Daša Drndić’s novel April u Berlinu (April in Berlin, 2009) in which the autofictional narrator writes: “Udaljila sam se. Rekao bi Robert Perišić, ona misli da u svoj neoavangardistički prozni model može ubaciti bilo što.” (I wandered away. Robert Perišić would say, she thinks she can take in whatever she likes into her Neo-avant-gardist literary model. Drndić 2009: 51). Also, in the already-referenced review, the critic Irena Javorski is using the same vocabulary to describe Tea Tulić’s writing: “Ono što se odmah da primetiti kada je reč o proznom prvencu mlade riječke spisateljice Tee Tulić, jeste njegova neoavangardna konstrukcija.” (What is immediately clear about the young author from Rijeka Tea Tulić’s prose debut is its Neo-avant-garde construction. Javorski 2012).

7 Conclusions. Inherited Possibillity, Or: Choosing The Optimal Variant

absent time, and her act of strolling is about the responsibility of memory; to be a flâneur – that is, flâneuse – is the ethical assignment. Daša Drndić constructed a complex network of Neo-avant-gardist strategies throughout her writing: from the recurrent appearance of the already published excerpts which thus construe a new, never in reality present book, to the integration of visual materials and textualist strategies of writing, and the abolishment of the boundaries between the document and fiction, as both a Neo-avant-gardist and a political gesture. On the other side, a search for the (Neo-)avant-gardist literary zones could bring us again to women’s writing, to the écriture féminine, baring in mind also the already theorized correspondence among the Avant-garde and the écriture féminine, and the fascination of the avant-garde authors with the ‘expressive discourse of hysteria’. Almost none of the analysed works has been ‘unresponsive’ to this bond, which clearly represents another ‘inherited possibility’ of the post-Yugoslav literature. A different crossover component of the post-Yugoslav writing is the primarily analysed ‘communication’ between ‘writing the past’ and ‘writing the body’, that is, the contingency of the recent and distant past and the issues of female authorship, voice/voicing, corporeality, sexuality, difference. The analysis began with Ildiko Lovas’ critical nostalgia and her practically programmatic post-Yugoslav writing. Her literary discourse delineates critical points of post-Yugoslav literary discourse, by incorporating the imagery of both nostalgic and traumatic memories and filtering them through the problem of female authorship. The issue of a ‘minor’ and diasporic writing has been also integral to her work. The following chapter on the postYugoslav écriture féminine built on this platform and was conceptualized by more in depth analysis of the procedures and capacities of the ‘flowing’, hybrid, and semiotic script of Tanja Stupar Trifunović, Tea Tulić and Ivana Bodrožić. On one side there were the bodily experiences of the mother-daughter relationship and their ‘organic’ influence on creativity and authorship, on the other, the encounter with death, again refracted through the language of the bodily. The analysis dealt with the ‘contention’ between the autobiographical inscription and the ‘nonexpressive’ language. The autobiographical inscription as ‘war literature’ was further explored in the chapter IV. In Snežana Andrejević’s novel the autobiographical was employed in an autofictional interplay of the narrator’s masks that asked the questions of female authorship, and writing about the dead. In Luka Bekavac’s novels the possibility of writing about the absent ones was conceptualized via deconstructivist and avant-gardist possibilities of non-representational textuality and a stress on literature as a ‘circuit of communication’. Answers to the problem of impossible histories were offered in the last two chapters by the proposals of feminist literary historiographies. Olja Savičević Ivančević’s novel was interpreted as an account of the nostalgic journey to the past, everyday life in a disillusioned present and a return to a better future. Figures of a (female) cowboy and a worker were the protagonists of this

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travelling. Finally, Slobodan Tišma’s protagonist also travelled back to the past, to complete his journey in a female commune, a literary reverberation of that female continent projected in the future by Šalgo’s Birobidžan. However, the works circumscribed by this analysis, though taken as representative, relate to the beginning of the second decade of the new century. Meanwhile all the authors have continued to publish new writings, further expanding the themes explored in this study. Dealt with mostly in the last two chapters, the class and Yugoslav socialist modernisation thematic have been progressively taken into consideration. Issues of the socialist factories deterioration and the position of workers are accompanied by the depiction of a socio-economic decay of the city environment and a ‘politically nostalgic’ reminding on the ‘better past’ of the Yugoslav socialist urbanisation in the post-Yugoslav works of fiction generally. Some of the examples could be found in Ivana Bodrožić’s 2016 novel Rupa, Lamija Begagić’s 2016 novel U zoni (In The Zone), Olja Savičević Ivančević’s 2016 novel Pjevač u noći, Iva Hlavač’s 2015 book Svi smo dobro (We Are All Fine)3 . The past of war also remains the subject matter of the post-Yugoslav writing (Luka Bekavac’s 2015 novel Policijski sat: slutnje, uspomene; Slobodan Tišma’s 2019 novel Grozota ili…). The uninterrupted interest in the marginalized and absent others also persists (among others, Tea Tulić 2017 novel Maksimum jata tackles the problem of migrants, while the lesbian relationship and queer identity are the themes of the latest novels by Begagić, Savičević Ivančević and Tanja Stupar Trifunović (Otkako sam kupila labuda, 2019)). In conclusion, it is important, and not necessarily a coincidence, that the book through which the link among the post-Yugoslav and Yugoslav literatures has been established and that helped historicize post-Yugoslav literature is the unfinished novel Put u Birobidžan by Judita Šalgo. A woman’s woman – on the other side of this link – is the author of post-Yugoslav fiction personifying women’s heritage which is not “an inherited property, but an inherited possibility, potential and freedom for (self)definition of historical lags in which we would like to be inscribed, that is to use our ‘lien’ for the benefit of future” (Jambrešić Kirin in Kašić and Prlenda 2015: 33). The open-endedness was, it seems, a precondition of the Birobidžan completion projected into the future, in Tišma’s novel Bernardijeva soba. Yet, what is even more important is that Šalgo’s novel is in truth not endable: it is built on a flowing, indefinite journey in search for the imagined female continent. That the journey hasn’t been completed does not imply that it would not be finished at some point: the end of the journey is “everywhere and nowhere” (Šalgo). The figure and

3

A quote from one of the Hlavač’s stories is illustrative of the post-Yugoslav literary protagonist ‘in becoming’: “ja sam ovaj […] koji će dobiti otkaz čim ovo završi, koji nema pojma što će biti dalje, ovaj koji sada ne želi biti niko drugi” (I am the one […] who’ll be fired as soon this ends; who has no clue what will happen next, and who does not want to be anyone else”; Hlavač 2015: 13).

7 Conclusions. Inherited Possibillity, Or: Choosing The Optimal Variant

the situation of going in a circle is also critical: it is an ideal expression of both the repetitive impossibility to change something, and a ceaseless motion forward. Also, a circle, embodying that already discussed limit and an interruption in knowledge ‘discovered’ while studying hysteria, is the figure of the impossibility to unearth the secret ‘circumscribed’ by language. That is why Freud considered the poets to be the predecessors and allies of the (psychoanalytical) discourse of the unconscious (Čale Feldman and Tomljenović 2012: 63). Judita Šalgo’s disbelief in an ideally structured space of the future as utopia pertains to this capital poetic discovery (ibid.: 67): while projecting beyond spatiality and totality of a utopia politically, this rejection has its literary rationale. Whereas already in the beginning of this research the unstable status of both Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literatures has been acknowledged, that this literature or these literatures sometimes appear as a delusion – a phantom – should be also read as their unclosed and varying structure, always in motion, in the protrusion towards the other and different; a deferral to the future.4 Danilo Kiš in 1974 defers the time of Yugoslav literature into the future too: “We had […] our moment, but it was still not our time: Ivo Andrić. But that, did I say it already, still was not the time of Yugoslav literatures. Let’s wait for it, in God’s peace” (Kiš 1974: 183). The Yugoslav future which didn’t come could be read – besides the evident pessimistic outcome – as the imagining of a differed time of (post-)Yugoslav literature as its only possible ambiance: “There is no essence or substance of literature: literature is not. It does not exist. It does not remain at home [...]. The historicity of its experience – for there is one – rests on the very thing no ontology could essentialize.” (Derrida 2000: 28). Post-Yugoslav literature ‘is not’, as a counter-national and counter-masculinist ‘canon’, the historicity of its experiences rests on the particular historical praxes (possibly those related to ‘the second artistic line’), but also particular kind of expectations. It is a literature always in search and becoming, like its protagonists of unfinished and undecided identities, the decentered and different. For, “[w]hat would the notion of agency look like if it always already knows its transcendental fundament and speaks always and only from that position? To be grounded in such a way would involve rejecting the otherness, the difference, refusing the debate, and minimizing the risk of our very own transformation” (Blagojević 2006: 59). Post-Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav literature are about a mentioned choosing of an optimal variant, or a ‘(self)definition of historical lags in which we would like to be inscribed’. Since the lived experience, the “actual societal relations” count, the two approach rather the possibility of the ‘optimal projection’, than a discriminative, perfectionist utopia.

4

References to Derrida’s concept of différance.

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Cultural Studies Elisa Ganivet

Border Wall Aesthetics Artworks in Border Spaces 2019, 250 p., hardcover, ill. 79,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4777-8 E-Book: 79,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4777-2

Andreas Sudmann (ed.)

The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence Net Politics in the Era of Learning Algorithms 2019, 334 p., pb., col. ill. 49,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4719-8 E-Book: free available, ISBN 978-3-8394-4719-2

Jocelyne Porcher, Jean Estebanez (eds.)

Animal Labor A New Perspective on Human-Animal Relations 2019, 182 p., hardcover 99,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4364-0 E-Book: 99,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4364-4

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!

Cultural Studies Burcu Dogramaci, Kerstin Pinther (eds.)

Design Dispersed Forms of Migration and Flight 2019, 274 p., pb., col. ill. 34,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4705-1 E-Book: 34,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4705-5

Pál Kelemen, Nicolas Pethes (eds.)

Philology in the Making Analog/Digital Cultures of Scholarly Writing and Reading 2019, 316 p., pb., ill. 34,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4770-9 E-Book: 34,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4770-3

Pablo Abend, Annika Richterich, Mathias Fuchs, Ramón Reichert, Karin Wenz (eds.)

Digital Culture & Society (DCS) Vol. 5, Issue 1/2019 – Inequalities and Divides in Digital Cultures 2019, 212 p., pb., ill. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4478-4 E-Book: 29,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4478-8

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!