Ugresicfinal EDITED

Exile or Exodus:D. Ugresic’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and Iliya Troyanov’s The World Is Big and SalvationLurks around the Corner

Dimitar Kambourov

The text attempts to offer a theoretical formula of the literature of exile by comparing two exemplary novels inthe field: Ugresic’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and Troyanov’s The World is Big and Salvation Lurks around the Corner. By overcoming their close reading the text comes to the idea of separating exile and nostalgia through a theory of indifferent love, i.e. of humility towards a world asan always already alien and lost home.

Key words: emigrant literature, exile, nostalgia, memory, globalisation.

…Питам тезащо рисуваш в моите тракийски къщи

танцувачи на фламенко. …Питам те,

защо рисуваш белите немкини в черно…Питам те,

защо рисуваш кипариси и маслинидо брезите на Русия? ...

ти на всяка чужда гараслизаш в своята Испания, …

ти рисуваш по земятасамо своята Испания.

(Hanchev, 1966)

Love and hatred for the old countryand the new one are part of the soulscape of the immigrant.

From an interview with Kapka Kassabova

It was about that time that my life radically changed, I wasliving in exile, or whatever it’s called. I was changing

countries like shoes. I was performing that fall-of-the-Wallitem in my own life… With time I acquired an enviable

elasticity. … Those little, firm facts, stamps in our passport,

Exile or Exodus: Dubravka Ugresic and Iliya Troyanov

accumulate and at certain moment they become illegiblelines. They suddenly begin to trace an inner map, the map

of the unreal, the imaginary. And it is only then that theyexpress the immeasurable experience of exile. Yes, exile is

like a nightmare … it seems to us that we have alreadybeen there…

(Dubravka Ugrešić, 1997: 118-9)

A Bulgarian joke from the communist period,uncertain whether to remain philosophical orto become political, goes: A man goes to thetailor to have a suit made. The tailor says:“Come tomorrow, the suit will be ready, noneed of fitting.” The man comes in on thenext day and the suit is ready, only when hetries it on, it looks terrible: one sleeve islonger than the other, one of the creases goesastray, the left shoulder is higher, the rightone hangs. “What is this?”asks the man. “Don'tworry, everything will be fine, could youraise a little the right shoulder and drop theleft, now turn this leg inside and stretchthis arm, well, you see now how beautifully itfits you and suits you!”. The man then walksalong the street in his new suit and with hisnew gait and hears someone sharing with hiscompanions: “Look, what a freak yet howbeautifully his suit suits him!”.

The following joke is about a man who has beencaught as he was trying to trespass theborder, all dressed in white. “Hey, stupid,where are you off to with this white suit on?”asks the guard. The man starts brushing hissuit and murmurs: “Where on Earth am I headingfor with this white suit on?”.

The issue of the recently flourishingliterature written by migrants, exiles ortrans-national nomads seems to be well covered

2


by these jokes. The motherland is bound toremain both disgusting and desired whenalready abandoned; the better the new identitysuits, the worse it fits – as if a well-madesuit on a freak unaware of where he is going.The question is what makes this sort ofliterature indispensable today.1 If these werethe quantitative facts of total print, awardsand the general perception of freshness andvitality imported - or smuggled - to thesomewhat stuffy atmosphere of contemporarywestern literature(s), it would be rather aquestion of literary history and culturalanalysis2.If it is the next “latest thing”, it shouldprobably be contextualized through conceptslike globalization, free flow of people, goodsand services, exoticism, book market,publishing empires, bored or borrowed critics,etc. Then it would not require a theoreticalapparatus tailored expressly for it, as thepost-structuralist post-modern ready-made‘difference’ would do. Indeed, the recenttheoretical and artistic reflections on thephenomenon imply such sufficiency. Twenty orso years after Deleuze and Guattari's «TowardsMinor Literature» there is not much new workdone on approaching theoretically the issue oftoday’s cross-border, trans-national,immigrant, diasporic or exilic literature andart.3 The questions of memory and writingoutside the nation have been addressed invarious ways.4 The concepts of in-betweenness,hybridity and creolisation have been put atwork and a kind of theoretical appendix hasbeen supplemented to the already establishedtheoretical difference, readapted to serveanother identity project.5

Since the tendency seems irreversible, thequestion is whether there are theoreticalgains to be made out of it or exilicliterature rather leads to a theoreticalpredicament. If modern writers are exiles perse, predestined to make neither a prophet norprofit in their home countries, does it really

3


make any difference whether they write ‘athome’ or ‘abroad’? Is not their work, then,but another agency challenging the verynotions of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’? If we agreewith Kristeva that the modern writer ispredestined to be cosmopolitan, then eitherthe exiled writers simply share all tooliterally the fate of the essential writers-exiles or such literalness naturalizes thecommon status of today’s writer.6 Is not thewriter of modernity deterritorialised bydefinition through the literal andmetaphorical power of so radically temporal anadjective as “modern”? Or is it that in casesof exile and immigration, theory once againexposes the unique personal experiences as auniversal metaphor, thus blurring thedifferences and burying the singularity?The recent interest in the literature of exilemight have the ingenious design to provide abiographical, existential, or naturalmotivation for writing that goes beyond anynatural, mimetic or psychological impulse.Such motivation would again have astructurally taming effect, though.Is it possible, then, to tackle the literatureof exile in a non-domesticating way? Could weconceive of a theory of exile writing thatgoes beyond its reading as anotherreincarnation of the postmodern idiom, onlythis time naturalized and morally justified?Since the issue of literary exiles andimmigrations is gaining currency, perhaps itspells a necessity to tackle it today,particularly in order to check for a bettertheory: is exilic literature a flash (orashes) of a fashion or a tendency towardsreshaping the map of writing?This text will be dealing with tworepresentative texts of exilic literature inthe hope of contributing to a blueprint ofsuch a theory. Perhaps the two novels couldeither make it to the level of an event ortheir analysis could demonstrate that they arebut another exemplification of the alreadyexisting theoretical idiom. My assumption is

4


that two very different novels broughttogether by the common topic of exile shouldsuffice to outline a territory that might callfor a theoretical approach. The field is relatively new, which accounts for its conceptual diversity. ‘Diasporic literature’ seems to be an infelicitous coinage as it reduces the literary function toa community of ex-patriots on an ethnic and/orreligious basis. The concept fails to express

1 There is no shortage of ideological motivations in therecent interest in diasporic literature: the fresh blooddonated by the ex-colonies has galvanized the culturalcorpus of the mother countries, etc. On the other hand,exilic literatures in Eastern Europe have partly filledthe gap after the discredited socialist literature. Whenit turned out that locker literature either does notexist (as in Bulgaria) or is unable to replace thewould-be «fake and phoney» literature of the communistpast, the literary curricula ushered in “emigrantliterature”. Nevertheless, the historical and culturaldynamics that brought to the fore exilic literaturedeserves – and receives – substantial attention. Exilicliterature is perhaps the only genuine phenomenon of thelast decades in the wake of sex, gender, sexualorientation, race, class, etc. Thus, very much like itspredecessors, exilic literature faces the paradox ofchoice: whether it prefers to be admitted to theestablished canon through its enlargement, or it wouldput up with the establishment of alternative canons,whose differentiation would be forever threatened bysome level of ghettoization.2 For years Bulgarian critics at home, including myself,have abstained from treating as Bulgarian a literaturewritten abroad by ?immigrants? in foreign languages,since those writers opted for a new culturalaffiliation, i. e. they to/did not belong to thenational culture. However, it turned out that none ofthree internationally acclaimed Bulgarian writers –Kapka Kasabova, Dimitar Dinev and Iliya Troyanov – mindsa victorious return to and recognition in their forsakenhomeland. They have given up their initial abstentionand have eagerly re-emerged to become instances in thenational culture.Yet it was hardly their own idea: two alternative projects to save literature compete today in Bulgaria. The first one relies on translating, promoting and selling abroad the recent outstanding Bulgarian production. So far, however, its international face has been outlined by a bunch of poets and writers who mostlyowe their translations to personal connections with translators and publishers. A rampant example is the married couple Mirela Ivanova - Vladimir Zarev, who

5


the solitude and isolation, or alternatively the ways of integration or affiliation of those living abroad. Immigrant and respectively emigrant literature foreground the act of a human being rather than the features of his or her writing. To distinguishimmigrant from emigrant literature makes senseonly from the perspective of national literatures recognizing their emigrants writing abroad and their immigrants writing within the country. Trans-national literature

have achieved unsuitably representative status as Bulgarian writers in the German-speaking world.The other strategy bets on ‘Bulgarians’ living abroadand writing in major languages, particularly if theyoccasionally accept and proclaim their Bulgariandescent, which usually happens when an award arises onthe horizon. Writers like Tzveta Sofronieva, MilenaFuchedzieva, Vladislav Todorov, Lubormir Kanov, RoumianaZaharieva, Dimitar Inkiov, Assen Assenov, Zlatko Enev,Antoaneta Slavova, Nikolay Atanassov (И тоз юнак ли е наконя на националната литература?)have been working andwriting abroad long enough to be almost forgotten. Therecent upsurge of mutual interest apparently has to dowith the proven literary success of the above-mentionedex-Bulgarians. Kapka Kassabova, Dimitar Dinev and IlyaTroyanov, known respectively in the East Pacific Englishand in the German worlds, have just been recognized as achance for Bulgarian literature to overcome itsanonymity. Bulgarian literature in general and itscontemporary version in particular are perhaps the leastknown in the whole of Eastern Europe. After –unsuccessfully – we tried to attribute Bulgarianness tointellectuals like Tzvetan Todorov, or Julia Kristeva,or John Atanassov, the time has come for ‘our’ writersabroad to be summoned back. 3 As a minor literature on loss and violated rights,exilic literature is a commissioned art. Although it isknown that literature’s mimetic bond is massivelyoverrated, the experience of exile provides a fertilesoil for a typical literary cultivation. There is ahidden aesthetic ideology in the alleged or promotedcorrespondence between the human condition of exile andits counter-establishment articulation. On the market ofdemocracy its critics and its outcasts are the mostsuitable dummies ?proving its potential for self-improvement?. By translating marginal or subversiveauthors, and by envisaging this act as an agency forestablishing a new European identity, the cultural andacademic institutions in fact enter into– blindly or not– a structural collaboration with political power.4 The debate being elaborated at length in authoritative Seyhan, A., 2000.

6


remains confined to the logic and nomination of what it is about to overcome or transcend. From another perspective, trans-national appears to be attractive but only as an anticipatory or futuristic concept, since evena global distribution is incapable of overcoming the spell of literary language and its publicity, including marketing, readership, awards and critiques. My preference for the concept of exilic literature is based on the assumption that it is literature that tackles the issue of exile,the latter motivating its artistic pursuits and enabling us to present it as homeless, prodigal literature. In the course of the argument an alternative concept of nomadic literature will be offered.Although the diversity of diasporic writing does not lend itselfto abstract categorization, which would effectively erase or

5 The hope that the trial of rupture, dispersion,fragmentation and «neither here, nor there»(non-)belonging would safely lead to another continuity,thus negotiating the new cultural identities ofcontemporary Europe, (Много е далеч глаголът. Хубаво щее нещо от предното подчинено изречение да се съкпати.Най-добре ти да решиш.) implies that the critical,subversive and thus heuristically productive potentialof a postfeminist/postcolonial theory is meant to besacrificed in the name of constituting a newEuropeanness. It is both tempting and soothing toimagine such Europeanness as a lapidary version of thedispersed non-identity of immigrants and exiles, ofdiasporic and trans-national writers and artists. Yet itwould be another theoretically forged utopia, stragglingbehind the arts, sciences, and businesses of aglobalizing world. The perfume of sacrificialheroization of exilic literature may thus turn flat.6 An element, act or figure of exile is, or should be, ageneral property or a prerequisite for any artisticcreativity. Kristeva and others have suggested thatgoing into language can be interpreted as a final act ofbanishment from the pre-linguistic spaces and practicesof genuine communication, whose perfect and perhapsidealized model is the one within the mother's womb.Therefore, exile is a general human condition.Literature as the only discourse that simultaneouslyrecognizes, performs and subverts the fundamental exileof human existence, and whose country of exile is againlanguage itself, is a theoretical utopia which has notyet exhausted its heuristic potential. (See Kristeva,1984; 82; 86; 91).

7


neutralize differences, the works discussed here share thecommon feature of being both creative and experimental andself-reflexive and theoretical, writes Azade Seyhan inher seminal book (2000, p. 13). The texts tobe discussed here will sail through the self-reflexivity test; they might be aptlydescribed as both experimental andtheoretical, and perhaps also “creative”,whatever that means. Although they addressexile in the traditional terms of loss,solitude, emptiness, nostalgia, etc., theyrefrain from making diagnoses or fromindulging in sombre self-lamentation. Exile ison the spotlight of those novels yet itsinterpretation goes well beyond anycommonsensical articulations.The novels to be discussed are The Museum ofUnconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić and DieWelt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall (The World is Big andSalvation Lurks around the Corner) by Ilya Troyanov.The original reasons for this choice werepersonal but also national. A copy ofUgresic's novel was signed to me in 2000 and Ipledged to write something on thiscontemporary masterpiece. Ugrešić – one of themost renowned contemporary writers of exilicliterature – writes in Croatian and was bornin Croatia, but her exile from Zagreb in theearly 90s is prefigured by her Bulgarianmother’s departure from Varna, my hometown, inthe late 40s. Troyanov’s novel is looselybased on his personal experience of a 6-year-old boy whose parents took him along when theyemigrated from Bulgaria. Troyanov writes inGerman yet he has spent many years outsideEurope: ironically, his family emigrated,driven by the dream of Germany as a promiseland, but a few months later his father wassent to work in Kenya, a fact that made of thefuture writer a professional nomad.The two novels share enough to outline avision on exilic literature. However, it isthe disparity within the ‘sameness’ that wouldbe of even greater interest. Each of thenovels absorbs creatively the genres ofmemoir, autobiography and travelogue in favour

8


of the omnivorous genre of the novel. Each ofthem insists on a non-linear evolution withabrupt leaps in time and place. Troyanov'snovel is more scrupulous but also morefictional in dealing with time. Ugresic israther loose in specifying her timeframe oncethe exilic experience has been shared. Theevents unfold as the narrator returns home.Since she substitutes home for the suitcase(one of her metaphors for exile), the time-places start to blur, fuse and confuse, verymuch like the places in space: both are beingtraversed rather than visited or attended.Thus in both cases the story is told in anapparently disorderly manner.Nonetheless, Troyanov does stick to a plot,albeit suggested as a deliberately fakepremise for the genuine happening and meaning.The plot involves a belated second lifeinitiation, refiguring exile as an outlet forthe wider world and thus overcoming theinitial self-closure. Such an autisticisolation finds its counterpoint in Ugresic’snovel: when her narrator refers to exile, herwriting is permeated with (quasi-)quotationsfrom other people - friends, acquaintances,strangers, writers, artists, etc., all of themsharing the destiny of exile. Thus the partsdedicated to the actual experience of exile,be it in the layered museum city of Berlin orduring the innumerable journeys, usher in anenormous amount of the speech of others: as ifthe narrator has lost her ability to formulateany statement unless it is endowed withsomeone else's authority or at leastcompassionate presence; unless it is shared by– or ascribed to – someone else. This createsan odd polylogue of solitary voices entangledin a talk at cross-purposes. Although thedialogue seems to be doomed and the statementsremain wrapped in the quotation marks of theiressential detachment, the overall effect isless and more of a polyphony: theseaccumulated desolations create a Ligeti-likespatial vertigo of numerous parallel voices.

9


Troyanov remains split between therequirements of exilic literature and hisadherence to the safe-side model of the modernnovel, whose narrative is based on a singlestory propped by two characters, in this casethose of an ailing exile and of his godfatherdetermined to rescue him. After the complexand promising beginning the novel embarks on alargely linear narration: after fleeing thecountry the main character spends a spell inan immigration camp and, after a 25-year leapinto time, the central story of his breakingout of the hospital, touring the world andreturning home to an expecting grandmotherunfolds. Still, the device of skipping betweenunfinished, in-medias-res stories, with pauses,gaps and omissions syncopates and energizesthe writing. There is a telling moment whenthe godfather urges his godson to use hisimagination; we find him protesting a bitlater: Now you only enumerate, Alex… You should use whatyou've seen, there should be a story, a development! (mytranslation from Bulgarian, p. 149) In fact,this wish remains wishful thinking both forthe godson and for the narrating strategy ofthe novel in general.The reader will never beable to tell whether the consistent failure ofstorytelling about the ailing émigré is due toperformative purposes or to inaptitude. Theauthor remains faithful to exilic literature’sdictum to scatter a bundle of places andmoments whose interconnections, both temporaland causal, remain loose. Thus while Ugresicweaves her polyphonic texture out of numerousvoices, moments and places, all appearing in amotley, ostensibly chaotic sequence, Troyanovstarts with a rather elaborate timealternation only to quietly abandon it,yielding before a much tidier narrativecontinuity. At the end of the day, however,both Troyanov and Ugresic produce the similareffect of the displaced, and thus universal,actuality of any moment by subjecting it to aseemingly whimsical order imposed by the power– or rather weakness – of memory.

10


Such trimmed and truncated narration is bothtypical and telling for the essence of exilicliterature. The linear narrative projects aparticular model of a world and a lifeincompatible with exile as both experience andinscription. Continuality, causality andcompletion are in fact implicitly discreditedby exilic literature as the foundational mythsand the ideal models of oikos-focusedliterature. Exilic experience or its faithfulwriting subverts the smooth linear narrationeven when the latter seems pursued by theauthor. Exilic literature avoids thefabulation principle that has held sway overthe novel up to its postmodern condition.Exilic literature mixes outwardly randomphrases – overheard or recalled – of casualpeople and texts. Thus its story-tellingabstains from the triple unity of place, timeand action as the even chapters of Ugresic’sand Troyanov’s entire text prove. The exilicnarrative, as a rule, re-tells and quotes byheart, its stories failing to obtainbeginning, climax or ending, their model beingthe one of the lame anecdote with a vaguemoral. The only things happening to theliterary exile are the stories and the wordsof the other exiles – factual or actual, realor realized as such. The literary exiledevelops a certain sensitivity for thosesecondary, ‘artificial’ exiles who become suchwithout abandoning their countries or beingbanished from them. The act of exile emergesas a peculiar event deprived of story butpossessing the gift of identifying exile inall its reincarnations.In effect, the shared poignant nostalgia forthe past as the lost mother-country isbalanced by (self)ironic disillusionment withregard to the spaces and times of refuge. Byleaving home, the exile also forsakes theideal and the idea of home: its abandoningreveals it as always already impossible orrather unfeasible. Thus the notorious sharedlove-hate for both the old and the new home-country is a somewhat misleading way to make

11


us grasp the point here: that after theinitiation of leaving there are no arrivalsand returns left. The regular repertoire aboutexile, such as the punishment of the pastregarded as equal to a death sentence, shouldbe given perhaps a less sentimentalinterpretation: exile is a symbolic death withrefused metempsychosis mainly because itsubverts the idea of home and thus of return,of coming back, as well as of settling anew,of rebuilding a nest. Exile is but a symbolicact which makes space look like time – i.e.unidirectional and fluid.Each of these novels is aware that home andhome country are precious, not least becausethey have to do with the early years whenthings are not yet bound to be overlooked;they are here to stay in the mind due to thefresh cartridge of the memory machine.According to the two novels, exile is just anarticulation, a sanction of a universal act:that of losing the early past of childhood andadolescence. Exilic literature is a literatureof initiation not only as a sanctionedtransfer into a new age and social status, butalso into a particular right to forget andneglect, to drop and omit, to leave behind, tobe absent-minded in the literal awareness thatthe world is a place to be passed over.Therefore, an identity problem for exilicliterature would be how to sneak away from thetraditions of Bildungs and memoir literature,which deal predominantly with growing up:childhood, adolescence, youth… The figure ofthe left or lost home preventing return is acommon allegory of the early years of uniqueexperience when things happen for the firsttime. Abandoning home, therefore, might appearas an overdone attempt to displace the loss ofthe precious early years. Leaving home mightbe also a more ambitious attempt to prolonginfinitely the slipping time of initial andunique experiences. In this sense theliterature of loss obligingly becomes aliterature of deferred loss of first-timethings. The possibility of looking at it as an

12


acted-out secondary childhood offers atempting perspective on exilic literature. Theimmense heed that Ugresic's and Troyanov'snovels pay to the innocuous experience ofinfancy and youth, there being represented aspotentially prolonged through writing, shedslight on exilic literature as a loss of homeand youth infinitely deferred through theirartistic reproduction. Childhood, like livingin poverty, in a poor country or age, informsexperience with uniqueness, otherwiseunattainable. However, such an exilicpostponement is in fact incapable ofovercoming the effect of secondaryrepetitiveness, of reiteration withoutauthentic return. Thus the temptinghypothesis that exile is, apart from anythingelse, an ingenious attempt to prevent the realinitiation of growing up or aging by providingan endless first-time experience appears to beironically dismissed by exilic literature.Exilic literature is about eternal non-arrivalanywhere, and by the same token, about uniformfailure and deferred return, very much evokingthe short story by Thomas Bernhard, in which atrain never exits a tunnel. It is a nomadicliterature, but not in the sense of beatnikroad writing obsessed by the act and processof travelling. The gaze of the exile is struckby the peculiar myopia of a reflexive backwardglance; when driving he/she finds his/herbearings through the rear-view mirror. Thistendency has to do with the subverted cult forthe first-time experience whose gift isactually or symbolically lost with the act ofexilic initiation. As a result, the exiledevelops a kind of double vision: the freshand juicy reappearance of the pre-exileexperience, made up of first times, and thesecond, post-mortem life in exile, where thingsare deprived of depth and density but haveabsorbed the words and the dispersed storiesof others. In effect, the world appears to bea dream-like surface reality stripped of itsthickness thus stultifying any scrutiny ordevotion. The new places in such a world are

13


not important in themselves but to the extentthat they trigger an associational chainshackling indiscriminately past and present.As if the actual world were structured like alanguage, i.e. like a dream. The place ofphotography in Ugresic's novel is quite inpoint here: its ‘semi-arrived’ reality ishaunted by reminiscent remnants deprived ofdepth, substance, density, and thus of enigma.While reading Ugresic's novel, one gets theimpression that she knows and recognizeseverything she encounters along her ramblingsthrough Berlin. In the same vein, Bai Dan inTroyanov's novel manages to embroil hisphlegmatic godson in a global trip; they arepassing through cities as if without gettingoff their tandem bicycle, as if goingsightseeing in a dream. The small death of theexile makes everything beyond both unreal andall-too-well-known.The paradox of childhood is the one oftravelling: it always has to do with thememory of a happiness that should have beenthere and then; yet it was neither then nor isit now, not least because its experience wasmissed then and is missing now. The happinesswas there; it’s just that there was no one toexperience it. Now, when there is someone thatcan remember that past as happy, thishappiness is past and its actual galvanizingis hampered by the very understanding that themoment is gone and has been missed; thus themoment now is filled with a sense of happinessas doubly lost – there and now.Exile thus solidifies the paradox ofchildhood/travelling: visiting and memorizinga new place is possible to the extent that ittriggers the experience of a previous placefrom the past, which in turn has evoked thevision of another place and time. Exile is atime machine providing justification for themost fundamental human experience of loss bygiving it a (possible) name - exile. As aresult, the pandemic sense of pain thatpierces Ugresic's novel and fails to work outin Troyanov's book, is always informed by the

14


elegiac time and the intellectual distance ofrecognized, named and fortified loss. Hence,the restrained ironic slant, as if pain wereperceived rather than suffered.Exilic literature is thus made to a rarerecipe, mixing reminiscence, myopia, boredom,irony and pain: a remembering wrapped in thepainful experience of loss with untimelyshort-sightedness petrifying in the morbidboredom of the post-loss world.The organizational principle of the novels isas efficient as it is reflectively laid bare.Ugresic's novel is illustrated at the verybeginning by the enlisting of what is found inthe stomach of Roland the walrus. The chaptersand fragments which follow should be read in a similar way,continues the narrator and adds: if the reader feelsthat there are no meaningful or firm connections betweenthem, let him be patient: the connections will establishthemselves of their own accord.(Ugresic, 1 p.)Troyanov's opening chapter also assemblesfragments and episodes with no apparentcohesion or unity: the story of a family,narrated with alternations from generation togeneration, borders on a perplexing exuberancethat suggests family life’s density and self-sufficiency. Still, Ugresic is much more eagerto report in advance the techniques that areto operate in her writing, not only asrhetorical or performative strategies, butalso as objects or activities that are to bediscussed: a photography of unknown women, thefamily photo-album, the mother's bag, themuseum of Odon von Horvath, organized aroundthe principle of the writer's changing height,the writer’s villa residency, sea-shore stonegathering, the magpie treasures of a madwoman…I have no desire to be witty. I have no desire to construct aplot. I am going to … compile quotations (11 p.), saysUgresic, quoting Shklovsky at the end of herfirst chapter, which brings to completion thearrangement of the bits and pieces she hasbrought to her exile, ‘all random andmeaningless’ (232 p.).Exilic literature’s meaning is thus bound tobe hidden, promised and for ever postponed. It

15


is premised upon the paradigm of the randommuseum, of the photo-album, of the hobby-collection, of the autobiography. The readermight be tempted to subsume the exilicstrategies under the postmodern trademark ofencyclopaedia but the proximity would berather ostensible. The encyclopaedic principleby definition excludes the decisive role ofthe selecting subject: encyclopaedias areanonymous, unmarred by an author orauthorship, as if impartial, non-subjective,and in a sense, inhuman. The Memoir, theautobiography, the photo album, the personalcollection, even the museum are made up of theproper names of entities at hand. The goal oftruth or reality as such yields before asubjective message behind the principle ofarrangement. Yet the intentional message alsohappens to be subverted by the materialitself, which resists, goes astray,dissociates, disperses, disengages. Theexceptional presence of the visual arts inUgresic’s novel perhaps has to do with thenotorious mystery of curatorial practice,whose only warranted meaning and sharedmessage is the curator's signature, the propername that underwrites the endeavour. Exilicliterature seems to owe more to curatorial artthan to classical narration: the literaryexile arranges the material at hand and instore like a curator, hoping for a splitbetween the will to elicit its meaning and tolet it grow and rise by its own will. The mainattraction of such artwork comes from thechallenging enigma of its organizationalprinciple; a principle that not only allows,but also stages breakages and failures of anyconceivable logic, message, intention,meaning, sense, symmetry, regularity, properbeauty. To undo one’s own game is as crucialfor a good curator as it is for a literaryexile.Such a (self-subversive) organizationalprinciple raises a question: if exilicliterature bets on the free assemblage ofquotations, phrases, stories, bits and pieces,

16


whose presumed unity is ‘sanctioned’ by theauthority of a ‘weak’ author compiling listsrather than narrating or ‘figuring out’, thenhow is this sort of literature different fromthe general postmodern strategy ofcollage/montage of genres, styles, times,borrowed characters, stories, arts, books,discourses? Whereas the postmodern authorpretends to be more or less dead by ordainingauthority to language, literary tradition,history, geography, encyclopaedia, archive,etc., the literary exile claims a restoredauthority by virtue of his/her trespassing andtransgressing agency. The literary exile givesup the agencies of totality – not only the oneof God, but also the Aristotelian unities ofnarrative (action), of home (place) and ofshared successiveness (time), let alone thoseof proper grammar, national literary language,genre, discourse, style, etc. The claim tobeing that unique unity, that vast vessel thatwitnesses an inimitable constellation ofplaces, phases and stories is barely humble.By giving up the third person past tensepanoramic viewpoint, exilic literaturerelinquishes the system of characters movingin their shared trajectories in time andspace. The exile is principally incapable ofpossessing a companion, a sidekick. The momenthe or she acquires or allows one, he/sheceases to be an exile. Exile is a solitaryhuman project, whereas immigration impliesdwelling, settling, taming the other(ness)back home, re-domesticating. The moment theadult ex-escapee in Troyanov's novel isinvolved in the 'tandem' tour with hisgodfather throughout the old and the newworlds, he becomes just another Ulysses on hisway home, no matter how meandric his routemight be. Genuine exilic literature actuallychallenges the basic literary structures ofchrono-topos shared by two or more characters.The possible association with the picaresquenovel, which is based on loosely connectedepisodes dominated by a protagonist, is alsomisleading because what distinguishes the

17


exile is his/her endemic inability to provokea story. The exile is the one to whom nothingactually happens except for the words and thestories of others.7

The nomadic version of exilic literature thusovercomes exile by rendering it into aprofession. Ugresic's novel is an example ofsuch travel turning into travels. Yet nomadicliterature is by no means a travelogue. Afterdiscarding its narrative duties, nomadicliterature seeks to get rid of anothertemptation – the one of the travel notes. BothUgresic and Troyanov solve this problem in asimilar way: by fragmenting theirobservations, by cutting the pictures, bydepriving the narrative of details, names andusage instructions, by revealing the‘insignificance’, the dizzyinginconspicuousness of cities, countries,peoples, life forms. This accounts for thefact that, contrary to the Aristotelianliterary dictum, the character in exilicliterature is far more important than theaction. The characters are somehow intact bywhat has been happening to them and preservequite a paradoxical self-identity forcreatures in a state of flux: as if afterexile nothing can befall them. The unity is onthe side of the character, not on the side ofthe story. Even more paradoxical is the factthat the unity of the character is achievedrather negatively, since the protagonist ismore present through his or her absence. BothTroyanov and Ugresic's narrators are much lesspresent in their personal stories than intheir way of telling the stories of others.

7 Perhaps this explains why exilic literature isparticularly good at giving titles, at naming andnominating: it remains on the side of linguistic(un)translatability rather than on the side of mythos,i.e. of narrative universality. By crossing the borderof the home country the literary émigré strides from theworld of things into the world of their multiple partialtranslations. This, according to Walter Benjamin in TheTask of the Translator (Illuminations, New York: SchockenBooks, 1968), is the only way to unveil the genuine pre-language before Babel through accumulation.

18


The I seems to be possible only to the extentthat it faces and transmits a world of selveswith proper names.Therefore, it turns out that thepostmodern/poststructuralist theory of writingbased on difference is not immediatelyapplicable to nomadic literature for a simplereason. A key postmodern narrating strategytranslates the time axis into simultaneousspace structures; it transposes remote momentsinto neighbouring places, which fuse with eachother. Exilic literature is an anti-postmodernproject as it resurrects the power andauthority of the subject. The exiles – itturns out – are creatures who movepermanently, cross borders, end up indifferent places but their travelling ethosmakes them dwellers of a homeless time. Thisis another reason for the narrative to besystematically subverted. Nothing couldactually happen when the logic of moving inspace and changing places depends on time flowrather than on any form of causality.The present time in Ugresic’s mutant,archaeological Berlin consists ofmultilayered, moulding impressions, words,thoughts, feelings of the others and the I.Hence the ineradicable sense of journalism, ofreport, of essay; and also of meditation, ofinterpretation. Another effect of this is thedrive to trespass the borders between arts,discourses and mediums. Troyanov’s characteris almost dead in his present life but remainsdiscursively rich, stylistically diverse andpolyglot in general. Ugresic’s protagoniststrolls through Berlin only to see it throughand through as a palimpsest of hermultilayered nomadic time rather than only asher dismantled Yugoslavia. Photography, visualart and urban guide-like writing are puttogether to resurrect what was, what has goneand what is to be by the power of memory as amodel for exilic literature.Such seemingly loose narrative structure infact spots the main engine of internal unity -the protagonist. Ugresic's novel seems to have

19


a more traditional first-person narrativestructure, emulating the genres of a free-floating autobiography or a memoir. Troyanov'snovel seems to play a more writerly game byshifting the narrating voices, thus pursuing apolyphonic effect. Yet it is the insipid tasteof false expectations and annoyance withregard to The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks around theCorner that casts doubt on the entire field ofemigrant literature, when it is incapable ofachieving the status of nomadic writing.Although the author puts at work relativelymodern or even contemporary narrativetechniques – shifting of narrating voices,changing styles, alternating temporal layersand memory, vision and imaginationrespectively – his writing remains wearyinglyoverworked. The ultimate power of metonymy asa device for personal representation leads toan embarrassing reductive vision of what it isto be human. This is what does not work inTroyanov's novel, and this is what relegatesit to a decent example of emigrant writing: hedwells upon what should not be talked aboutdirectly, i.e. feelings. His protagonist, onthe verge of death because he has lost hiszest for life, is saved by a hero-cumtrickster character. The protagonist’smelancholy is rather phlegmatic, his lostability to communicate blocks the access ofthe reader to his vague and dim tragedy. Thuswhen life should be regained and the charactershould appear cured, the tramp-like characterof the story makes both the intellectual andthe emotional contact shunt. An over-interpretation might go as far as to insistthat such an effect is premeditated and thenovel relies on such grotesque staleness inorder to imply the effects of exile orimmigration; however, boredom is barely anexcuse.Also, this appears rather too dated as atechnique: the novel starts in a quasi-Joyceanstyle borrowed from A Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan but replaces its typical voice emulationof different ages with a Balkan, ironically

20


detached version of South American MagicRealism. Soon the latter is replaced by atechnique of the late 19th century: a face-value set of expressions whose real meaning isgiven in brackets, for example: oh, how sweet!(which is to say: positive predilection); what a caramel! (a signof growing excitement), thou, empty sugar-bowl!(disappointment)… (26-27 p.) It is as early aspage 16 that the powerful title of the book ishazardously gambled away through the profaneexplanation that the sugar beet, languishingon local soil, has been safely replaced by thesugar-cane export from Cuba; the conclusion isthat “large is the world and salvation lurksaround the corner”. Finally, the legendary-fairy-tale manner is also given up in favourof a leap somewhat 30 years later into theactuality marked by the unchallenged power ofmetonymy in dialogues like the following: “Weare summoning aid for the military cemeteries”, says theuniform. “I, instead, want to have my own Pershing”, repliesthe pyjamas. (32 p.)The point is not only thatthis is not funny; not even that it is a datedway of writing; of course, one could imagine apost-postmodern strategy of returning to themanners of the great realistic pre-war novelas a gesture of reaction and rejection. Thepoint is that it is neither relevant norefficient. This mix of Max Frisch with romannouveau and a spoiled Aleko Konstantinov8

leaves the impression of backward, obsoletewriting. The narrative strategies are liketrappings deprived of function: nothing seemsto be gained from the sequential change of thenarrators and from the change of styles.“Nobody cares a damn!”, protests a Bulgariancharacter in ?an English, leaving theimpression of a broken polylogue?.Troyanov’s writing feels concerned mainly withits sophisticated verbal command, cancellingany uncertainty. Troyanov seems to betolerable through his well-earned techniques

8 A paradigmatic Bulgarian writer of the second half of 19th entury, known for his travelogue “To Chicago and Back” and his masterpiece “Bay Ganyo”, an anecdotal narration/ narrative about a Bulgarian touring Europe.

21


in the first part, dedicated to the semi-legendary pre-natal biography of theprotagonist. Already the ending of this part,however, is consumed by the disturbing bulk ofthe novel. Troyanov is persuasive only whenhis narrator, a) has to rely on invention,fabulation and imagination, b) stakes on thediegesis of epic narration and description,c) does not count on memory, and d) hischaracters do not talk. In other words,Troyanov can reproduce neither his own noranybody else's experience and even morehelpless is he when his men and women have toconverse. Thus Troyanov is least convincing inthe exile components of his novel: the latterrequire knowing the languages of differentpeople from different cultures and times.Troyanov is capable of emulating a realisticnovel idiom from the first half of the 20thcentury but he is either predictable when hespeaks from memory or artificial when he hasto mimic human conversation or speech.Troyanov leaves the impression that his(character’s) exile has extricated him fromany form of live experience and has endowedhim instead with the dubious gift of thebooks. Thus Troyanov's writing is again aregressive one; however, it does not look forrefuge in his mother tongue(s) but rather inthe western tradition of the patriarchs of thenovel. It is telling that his character isgiven the highly unlikely family name Luxov,i.e. Luxurious: such is the style, such is thelegacy, such is the overall literary result.What saves this novel is its unpretentiouslydiligent and conscientious professionalism,combined with a kind of disarmingly plainsincerity. However, exilic literature has thetask to rise to the challenge of its attributeand to overcome the notion of lost, forsakenor revoked national belonging, in order tohave its say.

Ugresic’s play with the genres of testimonyprovides a rich texture, haunted by personalvoices, stories and fates. Despite the radical

22


perspectivism, her novel prefers to talk aboutthe others. In fact, the only objects endowedwith density in her writing are those withdouble refraction: the new nomad seems to beable to sense, feel, even love only throughthe senses, attitudes and bodies of theothers. The latter accounts for the numerousthoughts and stories of people we are toldlittle or nothing about. In fact, the narratorappears to be least persuasive when she takesthe risk of playing confessional.9 ButUgresic's narrator is exceptionally convincingwhen she is hidden behind her characters andtheir stories. The reader communicates on adeeper level with the narrator when she seemsto be most missing. The narrative’s objectivecorrelative of interpretive story-telling isdecoded by the reader in an empathy whichreleases an ample amount of feelings, nevermentioned or performed directly. ThusUgresic's narrator cautiously purifies andrestricts her presence to the level ofintellect and description, of irony and self-irony, of insight and its inevitableblindness, whereas the reader accomplishes thework with empathy and compassion whosecathartic effect does not impair theintellectual aura while humanizing it.10

A somewhat paradoxical effect of the restoredauthority of the subject in her writing is thepower of the knowing gaze. It sometimes robsthe constructed world of its diversity andrichness. The narrator's perspective is sopowerful, so colourful, so devouring that the9 The Lisbon love affair is the most dubious among the Sixstories with the discreet motif of a departing angel; it looks like a patch, like a foreign body in the novel’s centre. It is either a random lapse into a more personal tone or just a cunning strategy, as the unexpected journalism with political overtones in the opening of the part suggests.10 The dialogue of the reader simultaneously with thenarrator and with her characters is a trade mark ofexilic literature. Because of the ubiquitous pain, thenarrator seems to be exiled also from the country ofsituational feelings and unmediated emotions. The craftof writing on exile requires the narrator to play therole of pure mediator between a reader and anexperience.

23


things and the characters appear deprived ofautonomy, existence or enigma. The firstimpression is that the world told appearsentirely interpreted, understood,disenchanted, and reduced to a particularmeaning or message. This is often done in anextremely gifted and ravishing way: DubravkaUgresic seems to be aware of the predicamentof the partial glance; therefore, sheelaborates her embroiled embroidery ofunfolding irony, of insightful parody, ofmerciless truth-uttering. However, the effectis of a radical demystification which neverdoubts and whose answers always come out. Thusthe powerful, convinced and persuasive voiceof her overtly analytical narration leaves asomewhat discouraging impression of an all-too-trained and tainted vision, of a foretoldand tamed voice. The narrator applies varioustechniques to avoid this disenchantedmonologue of a life lesson known by heart: asalready said, she multiplies the voices ofalleged friends, acquaintances, occasionalpick-ups, and overheard strangers; sheperiodically shifts the manner of narration(but never the style) by replacing descriptionwith someone’s story, narration with moral orinsight; she periodically flees from her ownterritory of words and thoughts to theneighbouring ground of visual arts,photography, urban culture, new media,archaeology of everyday life and the art ofsewing. She is almost ascetic in referring tothe narrator’s personal life. Deprived of thefeather of personal destiny, she resembles anew Wandering Jew or a Borges-like Shakespearedoomed to tell the stories of others. However,unlike the latter and very much like a cursedcontemporary humanitarian, she knows andunderstands too much. Her writing on exile attimes ferments to an overweening universalcompetence. Ugresic’s paresia at times appearsto lead to paralysis.

However, her exilic literature is also one ofpain. This unique combination of competence,

24


distance and irony, and, on the other hand, ofall-pervasive pain seems to require a betteradjusted analytics, perhaps one that willreconsider the structure of Ugresic’s novel.From the very beginning it declares areluctance verging on abstinence regardingnarrative. Instead of narrating, it chooses toperform different genres, arts and practicesin order to find proper instrumentaria fittingits main topic: memory juxtaposing personaland historical bits and pieces. Those piecesare not meant to fit into a narrativestructure while they are good at representinga biography.Being a more or less reflected subversion ofnarrative as literarily essential, exilicliterature replaces its deliberate deficiencywith adjusted borrowings from (as I havealready pointed out) the poetics of differentarts or practices. As a preliminaryjustification for their implementation,Ugresic points to their artistic deficiencieswhich from a particular perspective mightbecome aesthetic advantages, especially in theeyes of literary professionals. As if tuckingunder an aesthetic program, Ugresic commentson what she strives for along the very act ofachieving it – the effect of the photo-album,of the museum collection, of the curatorial orartistic project, of autobiography.Traditionally the technique of stripping outthe device generates estrangement or aVerfremdungs effect. A greater gain for Ugresicwould be, however, if such reflexivity did notprevent the text from achieving the effect ofpain in the most elaborate manner of “non-professional” imitation of professionalism.From this perspective, it seems more plausiblethat exilic literature provides analternative: in overcoming its ownpredicaments it turns into a literature wewould call nomadic, which is the case withUgresic’s novel, or to get domesticated as anincarnation of immigrant literature, whichhappens to Troyanov’s book. Ugresic's literaryproject is eager to suggest this essential

25


immeasurability of exile or whatever it's called. Thehorizon of expectations with regard to theexiles is by no means one, unified orunanimous, yet it is not protected from beingcategorical: either cynically distrustful withregard to the pangs of banishment orsuperficially compassionate with regard to thedoom of homelessness. Nomadic literature, infact, strives to avoid the trap of exile asbeing automatically associated with nostalgia orhomesickness. Perhaps the allegory of the ex-colonies, rather than the parable of theprodigal son, provides a model for nomadicliterature. English allows this pun as mothercountry could both be ‘mother land’ and‘parent state’. Very much like the ex-colonies, which fought for and finallyachieved their independence, the attitudetowards the mother country is exceptionallyambiguous. From the perspective of theliterary exile, the mother country is both amotherland and an ex-colonizer.So what is the message behind these techniquesof fragmentation, of piled bits and pieces ofimpressions, conversations, quotations,memories; what is the purport of thisenigmatic museum of failed meanings at workhere: a mother's bag, a photo album, oddcollections, visual projects, a flea market,and concise biographies, all of them marked bydescriptive excess and narrative deficit. Thecritical approach towards narrative asimplicitly holistic and potentially totalizingshould offer an alternative.Undoubtedly, such an alternative model wouldclaim to be more authentic, to better renderthe reality or its experience. Its alternativetechniques are barely new, though. What is itthat rescues nomadic literature from fallingeither into the modernist assemblage, or, froma different perspective, into the postmoderncollage/montage? In other words, what makesthe well-known organizational principle workand mean differently?It does not take long for the reader,initially fascinated by the impression of

26


aleatoricism, to figure out that Ugresic’snovel is in fact a hyper-organized text. Itcomprises seven parts, four of which – the oddnumbers – appear under titles in German andstitch together numbered paragraphs, whosesequence is continued throughout the novel. Asfor the even parts, they are dedicated todifferent periods of the narrator’s past,named after different individuals, who appearto be her anticipatory doubles: her mother inthe second part; six encounters with exiles orinternal émigrés in the fourth part (anoveremotional American with a Polish name, anIndian, the Bulgarian grandmother, a lesbiancouple, an East-German nostalgic cook, and aPortuguese one-nighter), the narrator’s bestfemale friends from the abandoned Croatia inthe sixth part (six of them so as tocorrespond to the stories of the fourth part).It is also clear that the second and the sixthparts are organized around two photographs andthat the photographic principle of writing iscrucial for them. It is obvious as well thatthe first one and the seventh are mostlydevoted to Berlin as a museum ofincommensurability, whereas the third and thefifth focus on the exilic experience of thecontemporary visual arts of assemblage. Themirroring principle of palindrome accomplishesthe refined symmetries. Unsurprisingly, theyare made to tilt, stumble and dismantlethemselves at times: the story about thesummer visits to the grandmother is placed notin the childhood part next to the extendedportrayal of the mother but among the sixtravelogues; also, the description ofKabakov’s art works is situated in the partdevoted to the album as a family museum.Therefore, the reader faces an almost perfectyet delicately dynamized symmetry providingthe beauty both of order and rhythm as well asof free associations and random choice.Still, it remains unclear which of thestrategies prevails: the one of disorderly andspontaneous assemblage or the one of symmetry,repetition, eternal return and all-

27


encompassing self-identity and unity.Undoubtedly, Ugresic's novel strives toachieve a subtle balance between order anddisorder, between a meaninglessly bare lifeand its meaningful interpretation. The stakesare high because conveying life as it is andconveying meanings require strategies that areoften at odds with each other. The pursuit ofa viable reconciling organisation is a basicchallenge for the arts today. Ugresic's novelmight be easily located among a lot ofcontemporary and older literary examples whichequilibrate between order and disorder,between holistic sameness and scatteredmatchlessness. If the readers are unable tograsp this cautious balance, they might takethe book as both disentangled and repetitive,chaotic and predictable, dispersed and self-reproductive, and thus possibly doubly far-fetched.However, such a balance can hardly be peculiarto nomadic literature, whose theoreticalparticularity should not be restricted to itsorganizational principle of mirroring chaos ordismantling order. The reader might feeltempted to accept such elaborate disorder asdesigned to perform the very essence of exile,which, being deprived of the Aristotelianunity of time, place and action, i.e. of home-focused biography, replaces it with literarysymmetries of radical displacement. It is,therefore, possible to see exile as triggeringa whole system of transfers, displacements andsublimations, among which the one ofinterpreting exile as an essential humancondition is the most salient. However, if nomadic literature was about thepainful experience of a home-freak, it wouldhardly be of particular interest. A readingthat relegates exilic literature to the stageof homesickness, of suffering because of aparticular loss and lack, would miss the lightside of the exilic moon. Ugresic’s writingprovides ruses so as to enable a reading thatcreates hasty causal links between exile,nostalgia and pain. Yet the contradictions and

28


the contrasting principles on which Ugresic’snovel stands subvert such causality.First, the book is premised on the fundamentalambiguity of nostalgia as both homesicknessand ‘passed-time sickness’. The novel suggeststhat exile is both articulation and reworkingof the initial initiation of growing up;certainly, with an element of counter-projection because leaving home to some extentdisplaces the growing up: the prodigal son –like a figural anticipation of the sci-fiastronaut moving at the velocity of light – isincapable of growing.There is another misleading temptation,though: to treat Ugresic's book as smart,ironic, and critical in the way and on thelevel her essays and interviews work. Norshould one be satisfied with interpretingUgresic's novel as a twofold critique withregard to both media and literature, despiteher sneering disdain concerning the narrative-dominated media. Ugresic not only ironicallyreshuffles the postmodern idiom, but she isalso entirely aware what she wants to achieveand where she wants to go. In fact, in theinitial two chapters the narrator or theauthor herself formulates cautiously anaesthetic manifesto and an artistic programpreparing the reader. The key points of thisaesthetic program have to do with the powerfulartistic weakness of both the photo-album andautobiography:

Both the album and autobiography are by their verynature amateur activities, doomed from the outset to failure and second-rateness… There is only one thing that both genres can count on … and that is the blind chance that they will hit upon the pointof pain. When that happens … then the ordinary amateur creation emerges victorious, on another non-aesthetic level, turning even the most splendid artistic work to dust. In literature sucha work is an object of envy only for real writers.Namely, such a work has achieved with divine ease what they, for all their efforts, will never achieve. (31 p.)

29


The narrator or the author dubs this pain abit later the invisible angel of nostalgia that brushesaside the daemons of irony. Album and autobiographyare the genuine genres of such amateur pain,which is endowed both with a universal,omnipresent status as well as with an ultimatesubjectivity. This pain is also illustrated bythe ambiguous genre of the primer, which issplit between the naively blatant ideology ofan imposed signified and the would-be radicalinnocence of an entirely empty signifier. Infact, the pages that introduce the aestheticsof pain and authenticity are among thefunniest, (self-) ironic and skilfullyelaborate. With a tongue-in-cheek tone theyenlist/list the peculiar requirements for suchan art of pain. It turns out it has to do withbeauty and authenticity, with the beauty oftruth, but also with the prosthesis of anotherlanguage, be it the foreign language ofEnglish through which a girl shares the banalyet intimate story of her just failed suicide(34-35 pp.), be it the artificial language ofthe «A» free essay whose contemplative-nostalgic toneis transfixed by the precocious meditation on theleaves falling from the nearby tree and profound anxiety overthe so-called transience of life (33 p.); be it thecomparison between the literature of stylistictricks and the one defined as beautiful and authentic(34 p.).Ugresic is known for being a highly ironic aswell as a pain-provoking author, hertechniques recalling the authentic amateurismof the young couple who kiss like 'amateurs'imitating … the film stars. She names this the pain ofdifference and the angel of nostalgia, and the sheercontradiction between the two expressionscreates the field, where the contemplationover this kind of pain beyond aesthetics hasto spread. Ugresic’s irony seems to targetproper professional writers (of IlyaTroyanov’s stripe) who pursue the effect ofpain but who remain under the auspices ofgrand literature, genre and craft. But hers isalso a self-irony, a warning that what shestrives for is possibly a doomed effort

30


because she is, after all, an all-too-professional writer whose pain is but aperformed effect, a trick, a stunt.Ugresic's novel is bound not only to go beyondthe media politics of exile as a phenomenonexhausted by perceptions like loss,separation, solitude and nostalgia, but alsobeyond her own poetics of the album,autobiography and other forms of(re)collection. What kind of pain is this?Where does it come from? What is it that feedsthe sense of pain, displaced yet nagging?Ugresic often writes about exilic experience,hers and others’. However, in passages endowedwith exceptional clarity and profoundreflexivity she refrains from the notion ofexile as an epitome of nostalgia, loss andprivation, and reconsiders it as an option, anopportunity and an optics. Her literature infact elicits a pain, alternative to the one ofnostalgia. Not only the all-pervasive irony,but also the gains of the exile’s hazardousgame are to be reckoned here. Exilicliterature is capable of overcoming exile as apredicament evolving into a nomadic attitude.A prerequisite for such an attitude is ademystification of the notion of home, adebasement of the economy of oikos. Exile drawsupon the figure of nostalgia: craving toreturn home where home works as a figuralextension of receptacle, thus enabling a pre-symbolic pure communication and providingplace and function. Thus oikos makes sense as afigure of incontestable order; itsimultaneously delimits and discerns objectsthrough their applications and humans throughtheir roles, thus involving them in aproductive communication. The figure of homeappears authoritative even for Heidegger, ashis notorious phrase about language as a homeof being proves. So the subversion of oikos,undertaken by exilic literature, has theovertones of a philosophical challenge. TheMuseum of Unconditional Surrender gets its genuinepower from the alternative experience ofdefying the economy of oikos.

31


Such defiance is never a direct attack. It isrefracted through the structure of the novel,which relies on a particular organizationalprinciple. This principle emerges in its purerform in the uneven shorter parts dedicated tothe experience of Berlin as a city ofemigrants and exiles, national museums andinternational artists, historical layers andflea markets. Those relatively equal and shortpieces of writing alternate between personalobservations, personal art projects andexchanges with people who never make it to thestatus of characters. All those brief piecesof writing in fact are never accomplished butrather halted, interrupted, cut off. In fact,with time they develop a certain wholeness andcompleteness, implanted in the pieces ofwriting through their recursive openness andinconclusiveness. This effect of indifferencebetween totality and fragmentation elicits apeculiar reader response of panting, a wordthat tellingly comes from the Greek phantasioun,'cause to imagine'. This panting, which stemsfrom the self-exhaustion of any part in itselfand from the alternative drive to continuebecause of a peculiar insatiability, producesthe unique rhythm of Ugresic's writing. Theeffect is that this rhythm conveys the specialnomadic experience beyond exile and itsgrievances. In exilic writing, it alsoproduces the pulsation of indifference betweenpersistence and distraction, between adherenceand non-commitment, between completeness andinconclusiveness, and at last betweenindifference and love; (Indifference betweenindifference? A bit too much.)a pulsationintentionally unable to provide a home to anymeaning or message.There is a tender curiosity, a distractedpersistence and an oblivious reiteration inthe way the narrator examines the post-exilicworld. Hers is not just the sharp eye of aconstant stranger trained to find its bearingsin any environment. The descriptions given andthe stories told project a gaze unable orunwilling to provide home to what is seen and

32


described. Through Ugresic’s eye and writing,things remain somehow detached, displaced anddispatched, uprooted and orphaned, separatedfrom their origin and history, and thusstripped of self-identity and inner integrity.Ugresic’s novel describes her exilic places inthe estranging and defamiliarising way thatimplies and imposes their homelessness.Surprisingly the same turns out to be validfor the stories referring to home. Thedetached, displaced homelessness of the placesand the things narrated appears therefore tobe the inherent style of Ugresic’s writing. Itcrystallizes in a poetics shirking the economyof oikos. Exile provides both an optics and aperspective for shaking up the naturalessentiality of home and home country. Exileis as much an experience of loss as it is aresponse to a certain ennui of home, aresponse to home’s parochialism,provincialism, congestion with national andfamily ‘values and truths’, etc. Exile revealshome and its values as largely ideological andhistorical constructs. From the homesickperspective of exile, home suddenly emerges asa sick home. Departure turns any return intoarrival elsewhere. Leaving home thus remainsforever marked by the sense of irretrievableloss, but also by the perspective and prospectof turning the world outside into a ‘home’-proxy. The exile becomes an oikos-promiscuouscreature discovering the relative proxy-mity ofhome as such. Leaving home is replaced by anentering language as always already other andonly as such a possible home for being. (Многонатежава тук)What the exile discovers is the home as a sickplace, and the world outside and abroad as adwelling space, or rather, time. True, theworld can become home only as far as the veryconcept of home is reconsidered from theperspective of a resurrected and revitalizednomadic ethos of temporariness,interchangeability and multiplicity, i.e. theethos of indifference. Such attribution of a

33


new meaning to the concept of home does notpass/go without pain, though.So let us go back to the pain induced byUgresic's writing. This pain feels like asweet pain. Yet it is neither voluptuous norlustful. Being intensively/intensely sweet,this pain is on the verge of leaving a hearthigh-sorrowful and cloy’d, to borrow from Keats. Itmakes it poignantly sweet, a bitter-sweetpain. Actually, I feel that (my) English fallsshort of describing this pain as the nostrumthat Ugresic's novel offers. Such a peculiarcombination of tenderness and sadness has aspecial place in Christian Orthodoxy.Expressed with the word 'умиление' indifferent Slavic languages, it might betranslated – poorly – with ‘endearment’.Умиление actually sounds close to both'humility' and 'humiliation', both of whichcome through Old French from the Latin humilis‘low, lowly,’ from humus ‘ground.’ Умиление orthe Greek notion Ελεούσα — ‘caressing’ — isamong the key visual hypostases of Our Ladyand has to do with милост, i.e. 'mercy', andέλεος — compassion, sympathy, empathy. InOrthodox iconography this particularhypostasis depicts Virgin Mary and the infantJesus cheek to cheek, which symbolizes theannihilation of the distance between the humanand the divine through the power of love. Thisproximity is also full of anticipation andpreliminary knowledge about the inevitableseparation that sacrifice involves, and moregenerally, it all applies to a sense of lossand death. In Greek art Ελεούσα has also beencalled Γλυκυφιλουσα, ‘sweet loving’ or ‘sweetkissing’. The key to grasping the pain, whichUgresic’s exilic writing induces, lies in theelement of compassion and of endearment to thepoint of mutual melting down; besides, thispain involves the awareness of inevitableseparation and mutual loss; there is also theelement of humility about one’s own humanorigin and limitations. Ugresic’s endearingpain is full of умиление and humility, thelatter grasped in its intimate, original

34


relation to the soil, the fertile black earthof humus, of чернозем. In a word/In short, whatUgresic's prose arouses as a reaction –emotional but also cognitive – is a peculiarpain that is also the nostrum she is offeringto her readers.It is perhaps but a coincidence that nostrum,coming from the Latin word for 'our', andnostos 'returning home' sound close enough tobuild a connection between nostalgia and nostrum;as if the pain (algia) for home might betreated only through the unreliable nostrum ofendearment to and love for the world after andbeyond home (oikos). Nostalgia and the pain ofdifference, which Ugresic tries to reconcile,could be put together only if the pain forboth nostos and nostrum, for returning home andreturning back to one's own past, finds itsnostrum in the in-difference within a worldtaken as Home. Ugresic's pain is one that goestogether with умиление, endearment towards aworld outside and abroad, where the conceptsof exile and home become paradoxically andproductively in-different. If nostalgia, thisSwiss illness, homesickness, Heimweh, is apsychoanalytically regressive reaction,Ugresic's pain in fact feeds on thisnostalgia, be it a pain for home or for thepast. But by thriving on it, it coins asubstantially different pain, which is capableof incorporating both the daemon of irony andthe angel of nostalgia.Even before promoting her aesthetic manifesto,Ugresic paves the way for the alreadydiscussed crucial feature of her writing: herstubborn refraining from narrativity. It isknown that since Aristotle the narrative, plotor mythos requires a conflict as the basis ofaction. In Ugresic's novel, however, there isneither action, nor conflict per se. There aremany characters there but none of them is infact involved in any kind of action orconflict with the I-narrator. Even when Doty’sstory is told, the sneering irony and sweepingabjection come from aside and from anestranging distance, as if the characters were

35


already separated by borders and otherboundaries. In fact, not only conflict andaction are missing from this novel – there isone more fundamental absence. It would bedifficult to find today such a relatively longnovel that can manage without the help oflove. The two love moments are rather aboutits absence, if not impossibility. Yet thepain that is Ugresic's nostrum reminds aphenomenon known as love pain or pangs oflove. But how could one experience love painwhen in the whole novel love, the conflict andthe action of love, ?the happening between twopersons are the most salient missing piece??What seems to be missing in this novel, and innomadic literature in general, is love as aninterpersonal act, actuality and action,because it has been replaced by an omnipresentlove without defined or stable objects. Thisnew nomadic love is endearingly painfulbecause the objects are inevitably abject,doomed to be abandoned insofar as they arevisited. This nomadic love of endearment andpain actually dissolves the getting togetherand the separation within a post-exilic world.Love in exilic literature seems impossible andmissing because this literature is all aboutlove; a new love for a world that could neveragain be appropriated and possessed. Exileappears to be this love without possession,without ownership. This is not so muchunwillingness to possess and to be possessed;it is rather the realized incapability, theemerging impossibility to have if one is tobecome in time rather than to be in space.This is a love beyond coveting and longing,beyond desire and will. Instead, this is alove for the one, which is neither the othernor the same, thus defying both the logic ofidentity and the logic of difference bypresenting them as indifferent. Such anendearing love pain of умиление offers its ownlogic of indifference per se, i.e. the exiles’apparent un-concern or nonchalance, theirostensible inability to become attached ?or tohome in on their new places?, is based on the

36


general impossibility and on their personalinability to tell anymore the differencebetween home and exile, and by the same token,between Self and Other. Ugresic’s indifferentlove for the world as a temporary abode treatsthe notions of home and exile withindifference and as in-different. Such anindifferent love for places and human beingsgrants genuine power to Ugresic's writing. Itpresents it as an ultimate incarnation of aliterature that overcomes its cornerstone –exile itself – in a nomadic vision ofindifference that loses both the sameness andthe difference but gains the power of non-possession, of homelessness as a way towardsdis-otherness. The logic of indifference isthe one of non-belonging but also of thesituational sheltering without cathexis.Now we feel much closer to the message of theperception set up/intended and induced byUgresic’s nomadic literature. Its pain is notto be reduced to an emotive response; itssensual aspect develops its cognitivecounterpoint. The sweet pain of endearmenttowards a post-home world crystallizes in theindifferent love which subverts simultaneouslythe identity-possessive self and theotherness-obsessive difference. Such anindifferent love overcomes those two poisonouslove drives of possession of the other and ofgiving oneself over to the other. Indifferentlove is a prerogative of the new nomad who(dis)misses the difference between home andabroad in the entirety of their meanings. Itis exactly this indifferent love withoutreturns and arrivals, without identity andotherness that makes possible the interactiveco-operation between nostalgia and the pain ofdifference. It is this indifference that slipsfrom both sameness and difference, which atthe end of the day transforms exile into anomadism which closes the power cycle of oikosas an instance of dividing us from them, oursfrom theirs, one's own from someone else's,family from strangers, here from there, homefrom abroad, the same from the other. (Too

37


long and cumbersome a sentence) Therefore, thenomadic indifferent love is the only love thatis not based on the imperialism of choice andsegregation, of favouring and discrimination,of dialogue and exchange.Thus exile is not about exile in itself. Exilebecomes an entity only to the extent that itopens up for a nomadic attitude based onindifferent, indiscriminate love for a worldstructured as a journey rather than as a home,as time rather than as place. Although itcertainly builds on the existentialist andChristian tradition of abandoning home, thenomadic upgrade goes beyond exile as a humancondition. For many, exile remains in thegrips of the usual suspects: loss, solitude,nostalgia, etc. But to the extent that it isfixed or displaced by the indifferent love fora world marked as an anticipated loss, itadvances a new nomadic lifestyle and anotherset of values. The complex of умиление orΕλεούσα projects human/man and God as almostfused, without a distance in between. Yet thisfusion remains a self-subversive figure, as itreveals itself as a rhetoricized wishfulthinking. The propinquity and intimacy in factdiscredit the fusion as always already lost.What is left after the initial separation andloss is a striving and a pursuit of anunattainable fusion, be it the one between manand God, man and the world, the self and theother. If home is a replacement/substitute forthe initial loss of the receptacle, then exileis the initiation of the second birth. Thusthe indifferent nomadic love for the world asthe next stage of womb/home comes to fix boththe initial loss and the secondary initiationof exile. Yet this love remains transfixedwith the pain of умиление/ Ελεούσα/endearmentbecause of the realized impossibility offusion with a world, which is entirelyhomeless and womb-less. Even endowed with thenomadic love which provides in-differencebetween the self and the world, the new nomadremains in the grips of his or her ironic painbecause the world itself defies its perception

38


as a home or as a womb. Thus nomadic love isan ironic sublimation of exile as anotherdeath rehearsal. Indifferent love is anindividual proxy-revolution after thediscredited revolutions of the masses. It doesprovide an ironic yet loving exit from thehistorically constructed and already obsoleteculture of oikos.Yet what is wrong with home? Where does thecrisis of the oikos institution come from?

The interpersonal situation, whose home ishome itself, inverts the meanings of theverbs, overturns the words by imposing thelanguage of imperatives. It presupposes aninterpersonal situation under the auspices ofthe imperative mood, in which everybody talksto the others in the syntax of orders, whilehis or her actions are expressed by therequirements or requests of the others. Home,oikos, is the inherent space of the imperativeas the cornerstone of communication amongone's own people: be it the simple case of thewanting/desiring child, be it the perfidiousasking or begging of the parents, siblings,spouses, friends… The economy of oikos is basedon imperatives, on the ‘give!’ command inparticular, which implies in fact the actionof taking.Abandoning home literally, or rathermetaphorically, is the first step of/towardsbreaking the spell of the imperatives'spurious naturalness. The initial replacementof the imperatives with questions, withinterrogative sentences marks the firstfigural act of exile. Exile as a preconditionfor the nomadic indifferent love for the worldcannot break the economy of taking and givingbut is still able to replace the oikos economyof imperative imperialism with the alternativeeconomy of asking, of formulating questions.In Ugresic's novel it is indicative that thefour parts on exile are named in German – alanguage announced as unknown – with two ofthe parts formulated like questions: Was isKunst? and Wo bin ich? The experience of exileappears to be all about asking and

39


questioning, often without answers and withoutexpectations, not least because imperativesappear to be obsolete or impossible, whichmeans that the questions cannot be (mis)takenfor imperatives. The nomadic condition of lovequestions things, places and people asindifferent from/for me and thus free frominterest, free from the power of imperatives.Nomadic exile reveals home as a disenchantedimperative and the globe as an entity toinquire about.Thus the nomadic indifferent love brings backthe enchantment with a world disenchanted bythe spell of imperatives. Being traditionallyassociated with the poignant experience ofpreliminary death and death rehearsal, beingmarked by the regressive stain of driving backhome, to one's mother and motherland, exile inits artistic reappropriation, becomes a timemachine. It helps overcome nostalgia as anepitome of death in favor of a new eventfullove – the brand of nomadic indifferent lovein the form of a permanent query, which meansregaining human immortality in the womb/homeof the globe. Nomadic literature is about thepower of indifferent love to move as a timemachine through the time layers in the globalnomadic space. By subverting the power ofimperatives, indifferent love in factdismisses the power of causality usurped tothe utmost by the instance of questioning theinstant. Indifferent love wraps in painful andironic умиление the world. By lovingindifferently the writing nomad unwraps theGlobe in countless question marks.The Globe thus appears as the homeless womb.

40


With its sweet painful panting of birth-giving.11

Endnotes:1112 The text may well arouse suspicions that the suggested approach towards exilic and respectively immigrant and nomadic literature is based extensively and exceptionally on Ugresic's novel «The Museum of Unconditional Surrender», and therefore remains an outsider with regard to the contemporary debate on issues like exile, nostalgia, contemporary nomadism, etc. For example, it is clear that my disqualifying, or rather, looking-for-alternative attitude towards nostalgia should delineate its standing in terms of Svetlana Boym’s recent classic (Boym, 2000). Boym's perception of nostalgia as a historical and modern disease seems tobe logical and understandable since she treats nostalgiaas another incarnation of counter-modern – or off-modernin her language – compensatory response to the deficiencies and exigencies of modernity. She also insists that nostalgia is still generally an incurable disease no matter how metaphorical the perspective.My point, on the contrary, is that the nomadic response of indifferent love emerges as a medicine, or at least as a nostrum for the pain or for the drive of nostos. The nomadic attitude, as it has been described, is the main achievement I elicited from Ugresic's writing. In her case, the nomadic response reaches the plane of a particular purity and density, which accounts for my devotion to her version of nomadic loveIn a recent publication, Svetlana Boym makes the following observation:If in the 1980s artists dreamed of becoming their own curators and borrowed from the theorists, now the theorists dream of becoming artists. Disappointed with their own disciplinary specialization, they immigrate into each other’s territory. The lateral move again. Neither backwards nor forwards, but sideways. Amateur’s out takes are no longer excluded but placed side-by-side with the non-out takes. I don’t know what to call them anymore, for there is little agreement these days on what these non-out takes are.But the amateur’s errands continue. An amateur, as Barthes understood it, isthe one who constantly unlearns and loves, not possessively, but tenderly, inconstantly, desperately. Grateful for every transient epiphany, an amateur is not greedy. (Nostalgic Technology:Notes for an Off-modern Manifesto; http://www.svetlanaboym.com/manifesto.htm). (оправи си цитата. Някакво квадратче има)

41

http://www.svetlanaboym.com/manifesto.htm


Well, Barthes’ and Ugresic’s amateur seems to be in-different from our nomad full of painful endearment towards a globe deprived of drive for womb and home.

Bibliography:

Ugresic, Dubravka. 1999. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender.London: Phoenix. (Musej bezuvjetnee predaje, 1996,Beograd: Samizdat B92; Zagreb: Konzor, 2001 –2002)

Troyanov, Iliya. 1996. Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall(The world is big and salvation lurks around thecorner), Munich: Carl Hanser.

Ханчев, Веселин, 1966. “Романсеро за Хосе Санча”, in:Стихотворения. (Hanchev, Veselin, Poems) Sofia:Издателство Библиотека за ученика, 2nd ed.

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “The Task of the Translator”,in: Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books.

Boym, Svetlana, 2001.The Future of Nostalgia.New York: BasicBooks.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward aMinor Literature, trans. Dona Polan. Minneapolis:University of Minnnesota Press.

De Man, Paul. 1983. “Literary History and LiteraryModernity,” in: Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoricof Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

De Man, Paul. 1984. “Autobiography as De-facement,” in:The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1992. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today'sEurope, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B.

42


Naas. Blomington: Indiana University Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York:Columbia University Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.New York: Columbia University Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1986. “Stabat Mater” in The Kristeva Reader(ed. Toril Moi) Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S.Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism,1981–1991. London: Penguin/Granta.

Said, Edward W. 1984. “The Mind of Winter: Reflectionson Life in Exile.” Harper's 269, no. 1612: 49–55.

Said, Edward W. 1999. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: AlfredA. Knopf.

Seyhan, Azade. 2000. Writing outside the Nation. Contributors:- author, Emily Apter – translator, Emily Apter -editor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

43

Ugresicfinal EDITED

Documents

Transcript of Ugresicfinal EDITED