“POETICS AT THE CROSSROADS”: SERBIAN POSTMODERN LITERATURE BEFORE AND AFTER 1989 IN SLOVAKIA: THE SPECIAL CASE OF DANILO KIŠ (1935-1989)

Abstract

The aim of our paper is to present the general reception of the creative life and literary works of Danilo Kiš in Slovakia against the background of Serbian postmodernity. We want to do this in connection with the milestone year 1989 (the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Slovakia, but also the year of the author's death), which unfortunately did not live in a dream of democracy in Central or Southeastern Europe. Finally, it is symbolic that D. Kiš's works were relatively well-known and well received in the territory of the former Czechoslovakia, and were translated both before and after 1989, while professional general reflection on his works is increasing, especially since the 1990s, when several literary theoreticians and critics have returned to his life and creative messages with sympathy. However, we will go in medias res and present all the registered responses to the topic. The approach chosen will not be chronological, the order of these considerations will be involuntary, but in the end we will also offer a bibliographical list of all translated works from Serbian postmodern literature in the Slovak language from 1989 to 2019 in alphabetical order. It is a list of translated novels, collections of short stories, poetry selections and dramas by contemporary Serbian writers, which have been adapted by several Slovak translators. The corpus of these translated works from Serbian literature into Slovak after 1989 is therefore not only welcome, but perhaps also fully accepted. In Slovakia, some opinions of contemporary Serbian scholars and writers are available in Slovak on the life and overall literary work of D. Kiš, who commented on his poetics and gradually their texts have been translated into Slovak over time. In almost all the postmodern works translated from Serbian into Slovak, several common tendencies can be observed. In their texts, Serbian postmodernists behave mostly subversively towards the literary tradition, constructing or rather deconstructing prose, drama or poems according to the theoretical principles of postmodernism. Their basic authorial gestures, which at first sounded ridiculous and too provocative in the (former) Yugoslav literature, did not change significantly during the 1990s, but rather settled. The source of the effect of "ambiguity" is the application of intertextuality, which is present in the texts both very directly and more discreetly. It is associated not only with the use of stylistically different speeches, but also literally different languages. Intertextual continuity within the texts takes place both at the level of their linguistic and compositional construction: the authors use the evocative power of those elements and (subject) procedures that can be considered symptomatic and constitutive for the poetics of various genres. These include the application and use of a characteristic set of motives, a familiar plot, a characteristic and readable story stereotypes, as well as the choice of realities or a typical way of naming characters. The feeling of fragmentation of the text is further strengthened by the self-referentiality of their works. This manifests itself in the narrative itself as commenting on, interpreting, and even questioning what has already been written. Their texts behave parodically and, as they relate to several prototypes at the same time, they are actually conceived as sets of intertext links. In their context, intertextual continuity ranges for some writers from citations to persiflare imitations of the genre as such. The degree of mirroring of the original text varies in them, or it cannot be accurately estimated. The individual text units partially comply with, they imitate the compositional rules and the form of the original texts, thus seemingly taking over or rather evoking their own genre affiliation. Their texts thus contain a false, because ambiguous and multiple, set of instructions for self-reading and decoding, which they then present to the reader. Of course, this will gradually prove to be misleading, although not unnecessary: only and against the background of the announced similarity with the original text (or imitated genre) can we perceive the "inaccuracies" that the authors commit towards it and against the instructive reading expectations. Thus, the genre "hybridity" is not only a means for them, but precisely the goal of the author's statement. It seems that the authors are trying to multiply the opacity of the textual situation in various ways, and they are far from aiming at a solution, but rather at deepening the original "mystery". In terms of the story, the "sacred" and key category of the narrator/protagonist/lyrical subject is also the subject of authorial interventions. It turns out that the chosen form of stylization is the starting point of the author's manipulation of the story. Thus, this way of reading really becomes an individual update of the text (on the author's part, perhaps its own implementation of the concept of "open work"), but at the same time admits its own incompleteness, because it is limited by personal reading experience. This statement therefore confirms the full competence of the author in dealing with both their own and the foreign text, because the scope of this manipulation is not "controllable". A paradoxical situation arises in the type of writing represented in Serbian postmodern literature by several translated authors. On the one hand, the strong position of the author is obvious, who appropriates the text and reserves the complete right to deal with it, but on the other hand, this very gesture confirms his dependence on the already existing originals. Creativity here then basically does not go beyond paraphrase, so there is a certain creative helplessness hidden behind the absolute authorial competence. This is demonstrated by the fact that a seemingly unpredictable violation of the rules of the story and genre settles down text after text. This is due to the fact that the author's poetics actually has only a limited inventory of (de)compositional procedures that relate to preexisting epic structures. Only against their background can his texts be "generated". Arbitrariness in dealing with the original text is finally confronted with the stereotypes of the author's gesture. So, it is a canonization of a certain kind of postmodern "mess" and the authors' complete submission to its rules. In this context, it can be said that the 1990s also bring a different understanding of creative autonomy within a social context. While within the "line of ironies" that can be traced back to the 1960s, the message of the text as a means of creative self-realization and reporting on the authenticity of the individual in opposition to totalitarianism is essential. Writing in the 1990s often only seeks to express isolation as a subject and its distance from social reality. In such circumstances, when writing refers only to the world of texts, then the autonomy of literature really takes place precisely as its “exclusion from social reality”. And remaining within the boundaries of the literary game, the authors finally give up not only any aspirations to transcend them towards the social context, but also the ethical transcendence of their own text within it. In the changed political and social situation after 1989, when literature lost the need to profile itself against the pressure of totalitarian ideology, the individual elements of postmodern poetics, which in the context of the clearly bipolar situation of the previous period sounded like an alternative or a kind of controversy, are confused. The result of this situation is a certain resignation on the part of several young authors in the 1990s: "young prose" mostly separates not only from ideological contexts, but also gives up the search for human, ethical values. The function of creating acting as messages about them loses its relevance. As a consequence, this fact led to a radical change in the perception of the social status of the book. It ceased to be initially understood as a thesaurus of values, and was declared a commodity. In the post-revolution period of the 1990s, "outsourcing" also acquired a new quality. From as early as the 1990s, it was no longer a matter of "outsiders" as a position of the marginalized subject in relation to the official centre. This was a position that would be an opposition alternative to totalitarianism. "Outsourcing" after 1989 is no longer a form of the author's forced "non-social" existence, but rather the result of a chosen text stylization. It can be seen as a tightening from the new reality, as a form of asylum created through text. Thus, it can be said that the passivity or declared "outsiders" of the protagonists, who strive for consistent, at least verbal isolation from the surrounding profanity. In the writing of some authors of the 1990s it becomes a manifestation of the subject's problematic relationship with the world, or even a specific expression of social frustration. We observe the specific use of the past tense in cases where the past character of the event or experience is particularly emphasized, when it is said to be the product of the reflexive mood of the narrator/protagonist/lyrical subject who remembers and renews his past. Here, the preterial forms of verbs, the witnessing position of the speaker, the many adverbs of place and time reinforce the idea of the authenticity of what happened. The created illusion of the reality of the narrated experiences blurs the clear line between reality and fiction, questions the past, what has already ended, and gives the perspective of its new meaning. The question of when the past ends and to what extent it is an integral part of what seeps into the present has an important role to play in clarifying the status of the stories being told. To what extent is returning in fact a natural state of reinterpretation, born of an intellectual approach to oneself and the world. Thus, the imaginary past is present with the real at a level that is its living and real necessity. A look at a specific or dreamy past experience is also an admission of the individualizing character of memory, it is an attempt at self-identification. The positions of narrator/protagonist/lyrical subject and hero agree in the search for the intersection between the narrator and the surviving self. These works seemed to be born in an attempt to combine two different ways of seeing. The emphasis was not so much on what "happened then, " but on the need to make sense of it now. Thus, the signal of attributing certain events to the past is not a reason to ask whether the fictional past is behind the real past, but to turn to the present, which deals with the idea of what happened. The demand of the past puts us in front of the way it is presented and becomes necessary. This compositional and narrative model separates the foreign past in individual narration by one's own narrator, whose language and actions remain relatively free within the narration that presents them. The absence of commentary, and a partial ambiguity in what happened, makes the works ambiguous. Not engaging in a foreign past is a unique answer to the question of the extent to which the other's experiences belong to the main narrator/protagonist/lyrical subject. Placing one narrative in another presents the idea of the outer (introductory) text and the inner (secondary). This compositional approach helps to apply complex functionality - not in opposition to the notion of reality, but as born of the world of fiction that preceded it. The encounter with the past functions as the main centre of gravity, the survivors are told as if already completed, the heroes see it in its completion and complexity. They turn to him, not to change him, but to argue their present, but it is a present without perspective. These different approaches to dealing with the past bring its relative completion to the scene in different ways. They model the human personality in relation to what happened and what persists in memory. A dynamic relationship to the past not only conditions its integration into the present, but also reflects man's relationship to the world around him and within it. We only have to hope that the new development of Slovak-Serbian literary and cultural relations in the years before us will also bring new values that will broaden our intellectual horizons and thus enrich the spiritual dimensions of the wider reading public.