The Serbian Novel After the End of Utopia: “Reconstructive” versus “Deconstructive” Writing?

Vladimir Gvozden

doi:10.3986/pkn.v43.i2.02

Abstract

Numerous Serbian novels of the 1980s and 1990s turned to the treatment of an older, allegedly forgotten history which encompasses the premodern period from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. It seems that this shift was accompanied by a political idealism and national-emancipatory zeal after the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia and its cultural politics. This paper will critically examine three extremely successful examples of historical postmodernism in contemporary Serbian literature: Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1984), Radoslav Petković’s Destiny, Annotated (1993) and Goran Petrović’s Opsada crkve Svetog Spasa (The Siege of the Church of Holy Salvation, 1997). This “historical turn” of historical postmodernism could be interpreted both as a deceptive attempt to return to the roots and as distinct archaeology with which writing seeks to examine the contemporary unsafe ground of the political, cultural and economic transition from the socialist system to democracy and capitalism. Actually, it seems that this kind of “reconstructive” novelistic approach, which can be seen as a deliberate postmodern double-coding, could be understood as a search for Serbian cultural capital that can be easily—perhaps too easily—found in the distant past. On the other side, the paper analyses “deconstructive” novels, like David Albahari’s Bait (1996), Vladimir Tasić’s Kiša i hartija (Rain and Paper, 2004) and Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba (Bernardi’s Room, 2011). The novels from this camp demonstrate that the complexity connected with the demise of meta-narratives is not easy to represent in a work of literature. Through the figure of a weak subject, the “deconstructive” novel is able to imprint itself into the unknown, to disrupt codes, to cross the border and the wall of the symbolic order of capitalism and socialism and their production of desire. At the end of the paper, the paradoxes inherent in both these types of writing are presented.

Highlights

It is impossible to assess the issue of literary writing unless we consider what context it is related to
There is no doubt that there was a strong literary field within socialist Yugoslavia – it meant literary traffic, publishing houses, literary evenings, programs and awards, a space where, for example, Danilo Kiš could have a circulation for A Tomb for Boris Davidovich of currently unimaginable 100,000 copies and where it could legitimately be talked about in many more places and ways than today
One question must be answered: what does it mean to say that literature has something with emancipation, that is, what does it mean to say that literature has something to do with emancipation in the context of the socialist and/or postsocialist time? We begin by claiming that literature in the territory of the former Yugoslavia from the nineteenth century until the 1990s has continuously played an emancipatory role