We will not be wrong if we say that literature is a search for the reasons or causes of events, phenomena or beings (purpose), but the search for reasons - as our reading experience suggests - belongs more to philosophy, historiography or science, while in literature this search is only one of the elements, or one of the layers of what makes literature literature. If in philosophy the aesthetic level is a second-class quantity because philosophy deals with the concept (the concept is neither beautiful nor ugly), if in historiography, which focuses on the relationship between cause and effect, it is reduced to the historian's decision to write "beautifully" and not only to fulfill the order for a scientific approach, if aesthetics is banished from science because there is no place in it for anything other than mathematics, logic and experiment (scientific imagination is of a different nature than the writer's imagination: the writer can to lie in order for the work to be true, while the scientist is not allowed to do so), aesthetics is a decisive element in literature because it kako comes before what: we value how a work is written, not what it is about. And yet, while we are reading Miljenko Jergović's new novel 1983. - or as we follow the novelistic maneuvers, as the subtitle of the book reads - it is not easy to escape the impression that this 700-page text is an impressive search for the reasons for the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia.
Jergovićeva 1983. it is made up of 33 chapters in which there are, say, 27 novelistic maneuvers, or, as the writer himself says, "planned and sketched novels (...) that will not be written" ("Vreme" no. 1834), but which in this way, like novels within a novel, like a kind of collection of unfinished novels, form a novel whole that resists traditional definitions. There is, for example, no unity of time and plot, the characters are generally kept within the framework of the chapters - except for the seventeen-year-old Miljenko Jergović, who, as a kind of emissary to the past of the writer Miljenko Jergović, takes us through that year 1983 (whereas he does not appear in all chapters) - and the sequence of events and motives is connected only by a thin thread of time on which, in fact, that pre-Dorwellian year hangs, and Jergović's text, we believe, cannot be understood otherwise to as the writer's playing with the rules of the game (which is unacceptable in the classical understanding of the game: one plays according to the rules, but one does not play by the rules). If, therefore, we ourselves play with our reading experiences, if we accept the game in which we ourselves invent ways of reading, and especially if we open passages to interpretations that, like wheat mortar, penetrate through the cracks of established meanings, we become accomplices in an unusual literary event.
FACTS AND INTERPRETATIONS
At this point, it is necessary to pay attention to the fact that Miljenko Jergović is as good an essayist as he is a writer of novels and short stories. That is why it was possible for him to play with the very rules of the genre, and to imbue the narrative parts with essayistic reinforcement, and to cover the parts dominated by data, newspaper reports or reflection with a storytelling atmosphere. After all, in the impressive seventeenth maneuver entitled "Stjepan Đureković", probably the shortest in the book, the narrator writes that the set of circumstances that determined the fate of the main character "should be clarified in these novelistic maneuvers in a slightly different way than it has been done so far in the press and in the courts" (p. 247). That "somewhat different way" is actually reading Đureković's novels, but not as a source of data, but as works of art. Apart from the fact that those manuscripts do not reach the art, but that is the plot. Stjepan Đureković was the director of a powerful socialist company that, due to its strategic position in the communist regime, could not function without strong supervision and influence from the Service, and it is more than a logical assumption that Đureković himself was an important part of the nomenclature. What Đureković did (or didn't do) and had to flee the country is unknown, but in 1983. he was brutally murdered in a German backwater. All Yugoslav newspapers wrote about that event, the narrator informs us, but in such a way that, actually, little could be understood from the articles: the newspapers wrote because the bloody event could not be kept silent, but they wrote in such a way as to tell everything but the truth. The truth, according to the assumption and the traces that the writer follows, would be that Đureković was laid to rest, not gently, by the Yugoslav Service. What happened before that, that the former director had to emigrate and seek salvation abroad, where he hid like a hunted beast, as we said, nothing is known about it. But the character is known to have tried to write a few novels because, as he was told (and he believed), the Service doesn't kill writers. A man, therefore, who before his mature years had not written anything and, in all likelihood, had not even read, decided to write a few novels and thus save himself. The construction itself is crazy enough to attract attention, but more important than the monstrosity of the construction itself is the way in which Jergović conveyed and interpreted it. It is precisely in this novelistic maneuver that we find perhaps Jergović's key philosophical and literary guiding thread: "interpretation will always be more important than factography, in which, in turn, there will always be something that would destroy the foundations of the attitude from which the murder is interpreted" (p. 248). This is one of the most magnificent not only Jergović's self-reflections, but also one of the fundamental principles of art and philosophy. Let's listen to this sentence again. In the facts, therefore, there is something that would destroy the foundation of the attitude from which the murder, in this case Đureković's, is interpreted, as well as Christ's (the narrator will write). Because times change, and the facts in these changes do not maintain their immovability and their fusion with the truth (the connection between facts and truth is very questionable), but interpretation makes them alive. In other words, facts without interpretation are nothing. Facts never speak for themselves. By themselves they mean nothing. Facts are silent, and interpretation speaks for them and with that speech gives them meaning. The fact that Christ was killed would be nothing more than news from the black chronicle or a mere administrative data of the administration of Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea, that the death of Christ does not call for interpretations again and again for more than 2000 years. This is why interpretations are more important than facts. That is why the story of Stjepan Đureković is truly born only in Jergović's novel. However, Jergović made sure that the matter in this short maneuver was even more exciting: within the story of the emigrant, the former director of a large Yugoslav company, he inserted the interpretation of the novel by the writer about "enemy emigration" (as it was said for the Yugoslav regime), Miodrag Bulatović. What an essayistic mastery! But the highlight, the core, the core of this maneuver is the interpretation of Đureković's writings. In other words, he, Đureković, writes so badly that it cannot be read. But now let's imagine a man who, in an indescribable panic, in an indescribable fear for his own life, just because he believes that the Service does not kill writers (someone told him so), writes five novels in an insanely short time and without any idea about literature, about writing, about art. In order to pass on his experience, to achieve this, Miljenko Jergović had topost office Stjepan Đureković, even for a short time, a great writer had to become a small writer (actually no writer), to be so even when he writes with his powerful sentences about the nothingness into which, through the process of transubstantiation, he plunged. He had to understand Đureković in order to write about him. (Like Flaubert who had to post office Madame Bovary would understand her.) If in the essay about Bulatović we read the great essayist Jergović, in the description of the hell in which Đureković lives and writes and offers his works for publication (and he will publish them all), we read the great writer Jergović. And she is all 1983. like that.
In order to write about Aleksandar Ranković and his days after the fall in two novelistic maneuvers, the writer had to understand that great criminal, just as he had to understand Ranković's wife, Ladislava Slavka Becele. At no point will he show sympathy for Ranković (for Slavka, however, in a moment of weakness - he will), but in an interesting and tragic twist, he will defend him from what half the world promoted him to be: a great Serb. Ranković remained until the end, Jergović will write, a dedicated Yugoslav.
PREGNANCY OF THE END AND FORGIVENESS
The story about Đureković, then, as well as the story about Ranković or Petar Stambolić and Mika Špiljko (so old communist aces), or the Turkish ambassador killed in Belgrade in 1983, or Jonny Štulić and Bajaga, or about "Šibenka", Dražen Petrović and Slavnić, or about the accident in the Marble mine in Tuzla (and about the fate of the engineer Leonard Pitten, known as Nardi), about the theft of Danik Kish's book Encyclopedia of the Dead, about the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo and a slaughtered little pig that he doesn't know what to do with, about a wedding where he happened to be and snowflakes, all these are loopholes in these novelistic maneuvers, which, "in a slightly different way", from slightly different perspectives and on slightly different examples, unearth the reasons for the downfall of a country.
There is, in fact, one great novel of the 20th century that, in terms of idea, could be compared to Jergović's 1983: The Man Without Properties by Robert Musil. Isn't Muzil looking for the reasons for the downfall of K und K (Austro-Hungary) through the characters of his novel? Using different means than Jergović does - after all, two writers of this caliber can only be compared in terms of ideas, not in terms of style - Muzil, through characters, but also through extraordinary essay sections, shows how and why an empire falls apart: there is a striking scene, almost a metaphor, in which Ulrich and Agatha betray his father's last will on his father's bier, freeing himself from the imposed properties. The qualities that K und K instilled in them, through their father, education and upbringing, were already dead, as well as those qualities of Yugoslavia which, Jergović interprets, will experience a collapse in 1983, and its swan song at the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. What Muzil's and Jergović's heroes, including those two Jergovićs from Jergović's novel, will pay for their freedom is another matter. Their individual lives are symptoms of disintegration, and Muzil's characters say goodbye to Austria-Hungary in the same way that 17-year-old Miljenko Jergović said goodbye to Yugoslavia in 1983 without actually knowing anything about it. This last wording sounds a bit strange - saying goodbye to someone or something without knowing that you are doing it really doesn't sound meaningful - but there are many such twists, or at least surprises, in this novel. Let's say, Jergović's readings of Kiš's stories from Encyclopedia of the Dead (here it is impossible not to remember Serkas' interpretation of Kish's story "It is glorious to die for the fatherland" from the novel King of Shadows), motivated by the memory of the ecstasy of the seventeen-year-old MJ, then we find the same procedure in the interpretation of Štulić's and later Bajaga's verses.
This novel by Jergović is probably more interesting to those who remember 1983 than to those for whom 1983 is a part of the mythical past, and Yugoslavia is something like Atlantis, but this does not have to be the case at all because, to return to Jergović himself, interpretation is more important than facts, and 1983. is one of Jergović's most impressive interpretations.
