 | |||
Elephant seal Roland IV moved in to the Berlin Zoo in 1955. By the time he died in 1961, he weighed over a ton. He died from injuries sustained by swallowing a foreign object that had been thrown into his enclosure. — Der Spiegel |
Literary theorist Yuri Lotman has argued that the beginning, the conclusion, and the title are structurally the most privileged places in a literary work. This seems to be especially true in Ugrešić's novel, where the author decided to separates (or frame) the two opening fragments from the main "narrative," if we can call it such. In fact, the photograph and the beginning narrative fragment, describing the visitor's encounter with the walrus in the Berlin Zoo, tell us much about how we should read this work and how we should not read this work. We would say that the Roland fragment is metatextual--it comments on the work that we are about to read, giving it a certain interpretive framework. It also announces the major themes, motifs, and places that will repeat throughout the novel: photography, three women, Croatia (Yugoslavia), Berlin exhibit or display, archeological site, objects, fragments, fate vs. chance, reading and the reader (suitable for this kind of literary work), connections or correspondences, poetry, autobiography, and police (political authority). (Also, pay attention to the titles of individual chapters. They contain important clues as to the text's meanings and Ugrešić's literary strategy.)
How do these themes and motifs recur in the rest of the text? What purpose do they serve? What is the best analogy for this type of novel: archive, museum, art installation, archeological site, scrapbook? Why does Ugrešić insist that we do not read this novel as an autobiography? And finally, what do you make of the novel's title, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender?
 |
| Muzey bezogovorochnoy kapitulatsii fashistskoy Germanii v voyne 1941-1945 (Berlin) |
 |
| Communist souvenirs, 1990 |
If we have a chance on Thursday, I'd like to touch back on the idea of the novel as a(n) (non)autobiography. I've been thinking about this since the end of our class today. "A night in Lisbon," for me, is not only the best chapter, but it works really well with Ugrešić's insistence that the novel not be read as autobiography. We have a very confidential experience, on one hand, yet an experience that is oddly familiar, relatable, and--I would say--even ubiquitous, to an extent.
ReplyDeleteThen, as we discussed today, we see the narrator toying with the idea of fate, which serves, it seems, to reinforce the universality of the chapter's themes. On one level, it seems like the narrator desperately wants to believe that she is not in control of what is happening; yet, on another level, her personal experience, it seems, is too raw to believe that life, or the cosmos, for that matter could be in control of what is happening around her. I love this passage on pgs. 152-153 that begins, "While Antonio..." and ends "In this case, life really was trying to outdo the writer." <--one of my favorite lines in the entire novel.
Thus, my point is that we see a very time/space specific scenario that somehow fits in the puzzle of the novel as a whole; but we also see a string of events that could seemingly happen to anyone, anytime.
Do you think this approach works with Ugrešić's insistence that the novel not be read as autobiography? Does she effectively convince us, as readers, not to do so?
It's interesting that you mention this story, which I also believe is the most successful in the entire novel. Here, Ugresic is in dialogue with Isaac Babel's story "My First Fee," which she explicitly quotes at one moment: "There is no reason why a well-thought out story should resemble real life; life strives with all its might to resemble a well-thought out story" (149). Babel's short story is about a young, aspiring writer in Tbilisi, Georgia who's looking for his first sexual experience so he can write a story a about it in a manner of Tolstoy, his hero. One night he meets a prostitute, Vera, and he "sells" her a story about how he is an orphan down-and-out on his luck who has to turn tricks in Tibilis in order to stay afloat. In a spectacular reversal, Vera takes pity on him and offers her services for free; she even tells him all the tricks of the trade, since the narrator is her "sister", "whore-bitches like us." This is how he earns his "first fee" for a first story he has successfully sold. Babel concludes, "All this was long time ago, and since then I have often received money from publishers, from learned men and from Jews trading in books. For victories that were defeats, for defeats that turned into victories, for life and for death they paid me trifling sums--much smaller than the one I received in my youth from my first 'reader'." Here, it seems to me, Babel is making several points, the main one being that writers are not so different than prostitutes, or even, they are worse. They prostitute their lies, their "stories," whereas prostitutes sell only their bodies. Ugresic plays with this parallel between prostitution and the writer's craft of storytelling, paralleling in an ingenious way Babel's "My First Fee." Antonio in the end turns to be a good writer, who's able to sell his cliched and most likely untrue "soap opera" plot to the narrator, and thus earn his "fee." In fact, the very fee that the narrator has earned for her participation in writer's conference. But there's one more metatextual layer to this story, the fact that Ugresic is now selling this story to us, her readers, and thus earning or recovering her lost "fee." Both in Babel's and Ugresic's versions we see also interesting gender reversals that could be explored in greater depth (paper topic, anyone?), but also reversals of life and literature. It is significant that the narrator watches a Brazilian soap opera before Antonio is able to convince her of his story. There's also the element of the fado soundtrack, the low genre of romance novels and "porn." If the narrator wasn't a writer, and thus in tune to various genres and their cliched devices, would this story have the same power over us as readers? Would it make us "buy it" more? As it is, Ugresic here really destabilizes authority of literature, making us distrustful of the literary craft. Or maybe, are we all the more willing to believe its veracity precisely because it deconstructs itself?
ReplyDelete