The compulsion to repeat

Abstract

Book Title: Polish Cavalry Book Cover: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Author: Marko Vesovic ISBN: 978-9958-501-64-7 Publisher: Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, 2011, 164 p. * no price available. Marko Vesovic was born in 1945 in Montenegro, and has studied and worked in the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Author of several works of poetry and fiction as well as collections of essays and translations, Vesovic's Poljska konjica first appeared in 2002. in 2004 a second, expanded edition followed. Polish Cavalry, the English translation by Zvonimir Radeljkovic and Omer Hadziselimovic, was published in 2011. In this volume, Vesovic revisits the Bosnian war, in particular the almost four year long siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. He draws on the words of others who, like himself, experienced the trauma; and presents these various accounts, including his own, in texts which approximate poems and occasionally short stories containing rich details of specific events, circumstances, places and people. Although the present edition includes a foreword by Vesovic himself on the genesis and purpose of this volume and a very helpful postscript by Marina Bowder, I was still left feeling like an outsider, unable to bring to my reading appropriate sentiments and insights. Even those who lived through it all, like Vesovic, find it difficult to explain what really happened. As Bowder points out in the postscript, Vesovic shares with many a sense of utter disbelief at the events in Sarajevo. Yet, the history of that particular war speaks to the world about the horrors and devastation that rivalling nationalism is capable of unleashing. Unfortunately, humankind tends not to learn much from history; and is therefore inclined to repeat its self-destructive behaviour, its past mistakes, as expressed in the first few lines of 'Things', one of the concluding poems of the volume: Look at this: wholesale looting again! People are cattle without tails. They are, God help us! They failed to learn a thing from the war. They are three times fouler than before: greed gapes from them. Reading the eloquent accounts contained in Polish Cavalry of very specific and very real atrocities and of human foolishness, is indeed a harrowing experience. T.S. Eliot has observed: 'Humankind cannot bear very much reality'. The reader may therefore be tempted to somehow explain away or dilute the unflinching claim of these texts through reference and deference to a (pre-approved) theory. In fact, in literary studies one often encounters a tendency to play matchmaker for theories and literary texts. The particular artistic text is often dissolved in a very general and superficial presentation of a well-known, powerful theory. Or a reading is not accepted unless if tan be validated with recourse to the 'higher' authority of theory. Such an approach, in my opinion, serves neither the cause of literature nor that of theory. In the case of Polish Cavalry, some professional readers may, for example, conclude that a reading in terms of Freud's views on Eros and Thanatos is inescapable. Such a reading seems plausible, as Freud had observed in his patients a compulsion to repeat with regard to loss and the trauma of war. This seemed to him at odds with the Pleasure Principle (the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain), as one would then question the reason for the patient wanting to return to the terror (in therapy or dreams). Freud also postulated that Eros is counterbalanced by the death drive, Thanatos. Thanatos refers to the drive in the (human) creature to forsake its specific and afflicted life in favour of a return to the indeterminate, the inanimate, and the pre-organic. There seems to be ample evidence of this force in Polish Cavalry; most notably perhaps in 'The stump', the poem which, according to Vesovic in his foreword, constituted the genesis of this volume. …