Abstract
Focusing on the work of Miljenko Jergović, Nenad Veličković, Alma Lazarevska, and Saša Stanišić, this paper examines how the representation of the recent past intertwines with the construction of collective memory in contemporary Bosnian prose. The author argues that a first, significant function of recent Bosnian literature consisted of not only witnessing the horror of the Bosnian war but also turning historical events into sites of memory. This is especially true for the literature about the wars of the nineties—the siege of Sarajevo, Srebrenica, etc. However, the involvement of Bosnian authors with the recent past—in prose written during the war as well as in more recent works—proves to be more complex and seems to be indicative of a growing interest in and reflexivity upon the ways in which collective and individual memory are constructed. This paper suggests that the interest in memory/remembering the recent past has been accelerated by the war and the social and political turmoil of the nineties. This liminal situation urged writers firstly to represent the horrors of the recent past in order to prevent them from falling into oblivion. Secondly, because war emerged as a kind of turning point, a radical break between past and present, writers were compelled to reflect on the processes of remembering and oblivion and on the ways identity is constituted by a strange and often unpredictable interplay of both.
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Notes
Interestingly, the shifting interest of Bosnian authors in memory rather than in history, in remembering rather than in describing/examining the past, also coincides with a general shift in the West from history to memory, an attitude that the French philosopher François Hartog (2003) has called ‘presentism’ (présentisme).
A fifth rhetorical mode, which Erll mentions only in her book Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen, is the historicizing one. Historicizing modes represent historical events as part of a closed, completed past, which now belongs to the field of historiography. According to Erll, they belong to the cultural system of knowledge of a group or society rather than to its cultural or communicative memory, in which the past appears as part of the present, as something which remains actual. Historicizing modes tend to make use of historical sources and are the prevailing, but by far not the only way of historical representation used in the (traditional) historical novel. Scott’s novel Waverley, writes Erll, is an example of a novel that combines a historicizing with an experiential mode. (2005a, pp. 177–178).
‘Mimetic approximation’ is a coinage of Andreas Huyssen, a term that, in the words of Kristiaan Versluys, ‘emphasizes that traumatic experience is inaccessible to language (no full mimesis is possible), yet there are means that witnesses can mobilize so as to avoid the terror of memory, while yet reviving it for themselves and their audience. To put it differently: mimetic approximation involves “closeness and distance, affinity and difference” (Huyssen 2000, p. 79) Documentary “authenticity of representation” (Huyssen 2000, p. 76) is never possible, since language distances, distorts, and adulterates trauma experience. Yet language itself—properly attuned—can carry within it a force that lends it a kind of mediated authentication’ (Versluys 2006, p. 988).
As Aida Vidan has remarked, typically, ‘the last few sentences in Jergović’s stories tend to carry much of the emotional burden of the entire text, with a slight turn of phrase often revealing additional and unexpected layers of meaning’ (Vidan 2001).
Most importantly, ‘documenting’ war is not the same as giving a realistic or naturalistic account of it. Cf. interview in which Veličković explains that he was interested in re-narrating real-life stories (‘priče iz života’) (Veličković 2008, p. 239).
Literature should try to convey a meaning, an idea, a moral truth, as Veličković claims in an interview (2008, pp. 241–243).
Apart from the siege of Sarajevo, other sites of memory are constructed—or questioned—in contemporary Bosnian prose. Not surprisingly, the genocide at Srebrenica is one of them. It seems, however, that this theme poses many more difficulties to writers of narrative fiction. As far as I know, there is only one novel dealing with the theme of Srebrenica, titled When it was July (Kad je bio juli, Zagreb: V.B.Z., 2005) by Nura Bazdulj-Hubijar, but it cannot rival in quality (it is not convincing and cannot really move the reader) with the non-fiction accounts of eye-witnesses as collected in Srebrenica’s Deadly Summer 1995 (Samrtno srebreničko ljeto’95. Svjedočanstvo o stradanju Srebrenice i naroda Podrinja, Tuzla: Udruženje građana “Žene Srebrenice”, 1998) and Emir Suljagić’s Postcards from the Grave (Razglednica iz groba, Sarajevo: Civitas/Biblioteka Dani, 2005).
Cf. footnotes 5 and 6 for Veličković’s ideas about the documentary value and character of his short stories and about the effect and influence of literature on politics and ethics.
A similar point is made by Jukić: ‘Veličković’s war clearly demonstrates that our age is quite firm about the boundaries between cultural and political centers and peripheries: if the center is characterized by weak thought, peripheries are characterized by perversely powerful ideologies; if the center holds valid that fact is fiction, the periphery will try its best to implement any myth on offer; if the center declares multiculturalism as its fundamental creed, the peripheries get ruled by ethnic cleansing’ (1996, Sect. 2).
This is also the case with works that, strictly speaking, do not belong to the genre of war literature.
Born in 1978 in Višegrad, Stanišić moved to Germany in 1992 and chose to write in German.
It might seem questionable to include this novel in an article on contemporary Bosnian prose, especially because its author has—at least to my knowledge—not written anything relevant in Serbo-Croatian. However, given the traumas wrought by the wars of the 1990s on the entire Yugoslav cultural space, and the cultural, geographic, and linguistic displacement of millions of people, writers and intellectuals among them, I would strongly argue that language is an extremely poor criterion for a writer's inclusion in—or exclusion from—any fledgling ‘national’ canon. Given its theme (memories of the war and of socialist Yugoslavia) and approach (life-writing), Stanišić’s novel can be read as a captivating example of how writers deal with the gap between past and present caused by (the Bosnian) war. In other words, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is, formally as well as thematically, too interesting an example not to include it into this paper.
Incidentally, this part contains some of the most poetic pages of the book, which only enhances the feeling of nostalgia.
For the following analysis of Jergović’s History Reader and Mama Leone, I heavily rely on the 2004 essay by Andrea Lešić.
As Andrea Lešić has demonstrated, a certain tension between mythologization and its ironic deconstruction can be found in almost every essay of Jergović’s History Reader (Lešić-Thomas 2004, p. 434).
Of course, apropos Aleida Assmann (2006), we could argue that in order to enable the shift from communicative to cultural memory, institutions are needed that continually activate the material storage mediums, such as a canon, which could be distributed by the educational system. Because I did not do any profound research on the reception of these texts, neither in Bosnia nor abroad, it is rather difficult to say anything about the way the images of war and the memories of Yugoslavia have been or will be integrated into collective memory. Admittedly, it is hard to say if any of these texts will be canonized, thus becoming part of the corpus of texts whose content must be remembered. In addition, the objection could be raised that a real canon of contemporary Bosnian literature does not exist yet and that school curricula usually do not pay attention to contemporary literature. Moreover, different school curricula exist in the two political entities of Bosnia, the Federation and the Republika Srpska.
A similar point has been made by Enver Kazaz (2008, p. 127).
The author is a postdoctoral research fellow of the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO). He would like to thank Frauke Matthes, who was so kind to send him a copy of her paper on Stanišić given at the ACLA’s Annual Meeting in 2009 (26–29 March, Harvard University).
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Vervaet, S. Writing war, writing memory. The representation of the recent past and the construction of cultural memory in contemporary Bosnian prose. Neohelicon 38, 1–17 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-010-0076-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-010-0076-3