Allegory and the Critique of Sovereignty: Ismail Kadare's Political Theologies

Abstract

In a controversial attempt to integrate African, Chinese, and Spanish literatures into world literary canons, Fredric Jameson argued postcolonial texts are necessarily and inevitably allegorical. Jameson proposed all texts, by virtue of their relations to communities embedded within colonial matrix, were national allegories. Whereas Western fiction enforces a radical split between and public, between poetic and political, in literatures, Jameson specified, the intellectual is always in way or another a political intellectual: private individual destiny is always an allegory of embattled situation of public third-world culture and (69, 74, 69). Jameson's theses have been contested subsequently, while category itself has come under substantial scrutiny (see Ahmad and Lazarus). Nonetheless, general alignment between allegory and role of intellectual in societies undergoing postcolonial and socialist transformations bears uncannily on literature of Eastern European well Middle Eastern nations, wherein boundaries between so-called first, second, and third world literatures are permeable experience of dictatorial power in age of multinational capital. (1) Jameson's categorizations did not encompass novelist Ismail Kadare (b. 1936) nor Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), although both authors crafted substantial political allegories from non-European histories. Mahfouz's first three novels, published in 1930s, focused on Pharaonic Egypt. The Egyptian author used past archives as vehicles to critique current social and political problems beneath a historical veneer (Stock vii). (2) Mahfouz returned to Pharaonic Egypt towards end of his life, authoring texts such Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth (1985). (3) Confronted by analogous paradoxes of power, and Egyptian novelist treat distant past less a source of knowledge of individual than a means of making fiction speak, allegorically, to present. For both writers, allegory at once neutralizes political message inscribed into their fictions and makes publication of their work possible. This essay considers Kadare's fictions participants in what can broadly be defined a postcolonial conversation, and elucidations of dynamic Jameson terms third-word allegory, whereby intellectual uses his fictions to comment on society and to pursue, through fictional means, its transformation. Buildings and Bridges During height of its power, Ottoman Empire's bewildered subjects observe Visegrad bridge--constructed in their midst in 1577 and marketed a gift of Ottoman state--with dismay. They now saw with their own eyes, Ivo Andric narrates in his classic The Bridge on Drina (1945), that these glorious buildings involved so much disorder and unrest, effort and expense (Na drini cuprija 22). Observing bridge arching over Drina River, connecting East to West, villagers wonder if generous bridge bequest was blessing they had assumed it to be. Half a century later, in what has been called an Albanian response (Elsie, Literature 173) to Andric's novel, Kadare echoed ambivalence expressed by Visegrad villagers in blunter terms. All great building[s], declared Kadare's storyteller in The Three-Arched Bridge (1978), resemble crimes, and vice versa (94). (4) In gazing at columns, can clearly see blood spattering marble. Given violence is one of several persistent themes forge conceptual cohesion within Andric's seemingly fragmentary narrative (Kokobobo, To or Not to Grieve 69), task of critic is to elucidate why Balkan narrations of state's sovereignty so frequently coalesce around violence. The ambivalences expressed by Andric's and Kadare's protagonists crystallize burden of twentieth-century Balkan narrative: to show how state's violence compromises foundations of its sovereignty. …