Combustions

About a certain door to post-Yugoslav literature-2

When the educational novel arose sometime in the seventeenth century, authors such as Grimelshausen, who is the father of the genre, or Goethe, whose novel Wilhelm Meister is considered the generic paradigm, had a completely different vision of human nature from Flaubert in L’Education Sentimentale, or Srdić in Satori. Every agent of education whom Wilhelm Meister meets along the way brings him some kind of enrichment of the spirit and expands his education. Unlike Goethe, Flaubert’s Frederick Moreau regresses, i.e. his education does not flow in a logical sense from not knowing to knowing, but instead follows the protagonist’s emotional development which is not balanced and teleological. Srdić’s post-educational novel negates every kind of education which leads to knowing, because there is no world in which progress and/or regress would be possible. The world is a big ruin in every sense of the word, and the Driver and his friend Moki are like zombies, the living dead, shells that are bound to become part of the scenery. Their return to a place where they felt more alive than before, is as devoid of purpose as anything they had done before because nothing fulfils them. Meetings that occur along the way, which are not straightforward, follow the shortest line, but in a round way and are in fact goalless; these meetings will not enrich their knowledge, will not allow any insight or any satori, but merely serve to prove to the reader that the world does not exist, that it is completely ruined. Duma, the half-witted keeper of a farm which is also a mass grave; the Hun and his mother who live by the river and who will help the Driver cross it in their boat; nameless gas stations; the motel on the motorway; the officer who became a cleaner; the truck driver who takes the Driver to the wanted destination, and in the end Moki, whose name may stem from the verb “to mock” – all live in a senseless world, whose existence is completely irrelevant, insignificant.

Srdić does not escape the frame he set in his previous novel or in his collection of short stories. His closest literary cousin is still Beckett, but Srdić’s theater of absurdity is enriched with a subtle ironic distance in the form of a key to understanding the novel. He is well aware which corpus texts he comes from, and at the end of the novel he extensively quotes from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. This quotation has a double function: it helps the reader to organize the text with hindsight, because sometimes the novel seems like a puzzle of narrative pieces and scenes, and this quote gives a certain teleology. On the other hand, the quotation refuses to be what it should be, according to the title – satori, revelation and epiphany. If the Driver and Moki spent their most valuable years when they were imprisoned; they weren’t living, and the big question is whether such a life is worth living. The dark side of Srdić’s poetics, which is set out in his earlier works, including those published in literary magazines, is enriched with the aforementioned ironic distance, which makes Satori his best ouvre.

Readers who love to play intertextual games, who love to explore soundtracks, who like self-quotations, will certainly enjoy this novel. It is based on a certain post-emotionality, on de-composure of every closure: from the narrative, to that of the created world, to those characters who are not able to dream one dream but dream two, ruin of the ruin. Nonetheless, Satori is a convincing mimetic picture of today’s world, not only in Serbia, but much further afield. Also included in the novel is Srdić’s political statement about the existence of PTSP, even against those who did not take part in the war directly. It is as if the narrative poses the question: “What is your world, what makes your life?” I am not sure that there is an answer to this question.

In 2014 Srdić published his second collection of short stories, Combustions. It comprises nine stories, which can be clustered into three groups of three. The first group, which provides immediate joy, are: “The Daydreaming Rat”, “Good Night, Captain” and “Summertime”. The second group, the one in which intertextual examination is dominant, includes the stories: “Golem”, “Espirando” and “Leng Tch’e”; while the last group consists of the following: “The Leaden Carousel”, “The Tale of How I.I. Settled the Quarrel with I.N.” and the closing one, which in my opinion is simply marvelous is “About a Door”. This division into reading classes should be taken with a pinch of salt, as a critical praxis which helps to ease the presentation of this narrative structure, and to show that Srdić does not give way to chance, because chance is the greatest enemy of art.

I have said enough about Srđan Srdić’s masterful use of language. I could add that in these four books Srdić managed to tame the language and put it into the function of what he basically does with his writing; this is the description of condition humaine, which is not cheerful at all. Srdić goes even further in these stories, and the question that seems to interest him is the one of communication or, to be precise, the lack of it. This is where the title comes from, because his characters burn out in a fruitless attempt to communicate with one another, and with their surroundings. Whichever story from the collection you look at, you will see that the real communication is directed inward; there is also no significant Other. Even when real communication is present, as in “The Tale of How...” (which is a very gloomy paraphrase of Gogol’s story), it is false, incomplete, one could say paradoxically unnecessary. If we raise this thematic level to an auto-poetical one, we realize that this is what literature does, it tries to communicate, but it often burns out in the attempt. It stays unread, or is either falsely or partially read. Its messages are like the famous Sartre’s claim of singing in the desert (also quoted by Danilo Kiš).

Superficial readers could claim that Srdić did not move on from what he had already done in his previous books; instead, he entered a vicious circle of his own reading and writing obsessions. Nevertheless, in the story “About a Door”, we can see clear signs of what will be the development of this still relatively young author. Not only intense emotional levels of the story which are visible during the mixture of narrative planes, skillfully jumping through the narrated time, crossing from third to first person narration, or the tone which is obviously more melancholic, even melodramatic, which could be compared to Bruno Schulz, but it seems that there is something else. The ironic distance of the previous text which had been extremely important, changed to auto-ironic because it brings about a further distortion of the perspective for the reader as well as the writer. All of this ends in a magnificent glorification of literature, marvelous auto-da-fe which enables life-in-art. If “Good Night, Captain” and “The Daydreaming Rat” depend on a completely false interpretation of reality by the characters, then the mild tone which the narrator takes, describing the kid/himself, presents a very important and valuable leap from negation to affirmation, from Beckett to Thomas Man, especially the Thomas Mann injection of irony and love. Satori ends with a long quotation from Flaubert, and Combustions ends with a sentimental tone in which there are traces of an almost classic beauty.

Srdić published another collection of essays, Notes from Reading, in the same year. Fellow critic and editor Ivan Radosavljević said that the book gives its readers insight into the master’s atelier, as well as insight into the books that influenced his own work. Srdić believes that no literature was created ex nihilo, or with a simple touch of a muse. His deepest conviction is that literary artworks lean on one another and that they are born through the experience of reading. The nine essays deal with seemingly disparate subjects, from popular culture to Japanese literary modernism, but each essay shows us the depth of insight into the nature of the artistic world that Srdić has in the academic field, while also revealing the primary level of pure joy in the text. If his fictional books are sometimes gloomy and obsessive, then his dealings with other authors texts is in fact an opportunity for sheer plaisir du texte, as Barthes put it. This is why this book is a cheerful diary of his reading and thoughts about literature, while also being an excellent introduction to the books these texts deal with. His research is thorough, his texts meticulously studied and written in a very clear, approachable and understandable way, as one cannot think about literature in blurred metaphors, but through well-argued and clear sentences. Srdić’s relationship with the literature shown in this book is distanced from the dominant theoretically non-defined blurriness which is more often than not just a mask for complete ignorance. For this reason, this book is in a way the key to understanding his fiction.

Finally, the novel The Silver Mist Falls, published in 2017, is the peak of his career so far. Radically different from anything he has done before, and from anything that could be read in the post-Yugoslav literary scene; this novel introduces an almost experimental prose which stems from the most radically modern and postmodern models. Although it should be read as a novel about the impossibility of communication, which is the closest encounter between two human beings, I would say that it is basically a love story or, if it is possible to say, it is an anti-love story. The book opens with a woman who is involved with a very complicated, self-absorbed and secluded man, who is also an author: this is probably the most testing love story Srdić has ever written. But the novel has much more to offer. It produces as many meanings as there are readers, and according to sale figures, the numbers are constantly growing. Which is kind of a surprise because one has to be patient to make it through this novel.

Readers have to accept that it is written in two voices and two perspectives, but they also have to understand a strange pagination, the sentences that begin and end in unusual places, to be in something paradoxical – the author is trying to communicate the impossibility of any communication – through language. If Derrida had written novels he would have loved to write this one. To make it easier for the reader, Srdić begins with an almost classic detective plot. But even if the person who Sonja has been looking for is found, the quest stays unrewarded.

The Silver Mist Falls has so much to offer to its readers – it is filled with almost everything that is important and terrifying in today’s world: violence as its most banal emanation, the digital world in which we look for everything we cannot have in the real one, enjoyment in terror and horror, which are enabled through social networking and new media. Our scopophilia has peaked. However, the novel ends on a positive note, with some kind of dedication to the famous monologue of Molly Bloom from Ulysses. The world will endure, we cannot destroy it fully and someone will get out of this ill communication as a better person, as a lucky looser. In this sense, we could even talk about The Silver Mist Falls as the most optimistic of all of Srdić’s novels.

Srđan Srdić is probably the most important author in post-Yugoslav literature. He is someone who shifts it from the inherent provinciality, whereby it was judged not only because it does not belong to the Grand Canon, but also because it is self-absorbed. The opportunity for the reader to read Srdić’s stories in English is very important not only for the author, but also for spreading the word that in this part of the world there are authors who are definitely worth reading.

Vladimir Arsenić

Literary critic