Writing the Yugoslav Wars

WRITING THE YUGOSLAV WARS WRITING THE YUGOSLAV WARS Literature, Postmodernism, and the Ethics of Representation DRAGANA OBRAdOVIC´ UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2016 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-2954-7 (cloth) Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Obradovic´, Dragana, author Writing the Yugoslav wars : literature, postmodernism, and the ethics of representation / Dragana Obradovic´. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-2954-7 (cloth) 1. Yugoslav literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Yugoslav War, 1991–1995 – Literature and the war. 3. War and literature – Yugoslavia – History – 20th century. 4. Postmodernism – Yugoslavia. I. Title. PG567.O27 2016 891.8’2609006 C2016-903912-9 CC-BY-NC-ND This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative License. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact University of Tor onto Press. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 1 War, Postmodernism, and Literary Immanence 20 2 The Spectacle of the Siege 37 3 The Phantasmagoria and Seduction of Kitsch 66 4 The Search for a Language of the Historical Present 100 5 The Quickened Moral Pulse 138 Conclusion 159 Notes 165 Bibliography 197 Index 211 Acknowledgments Most of this work was written while I was working at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto – a supportive and intellectually stimulating environment. Thank you to my colleagues who provided me with important feedback on my work in formal and informal ways. Manda Vrkljan, librarian at St Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, was formidable in assisting me with endless queries. I have benefited greatly from the University of Toronto’s New Researcher Award, which enabled me to finish this manuscript and undertake essential research trips to Sarajevo and Belgrade. My doctoral research at University College London was the beginning of this project. I would like to thank Zoran Milutinovic´ , my supervisor, for his mentorship and assured guidance during my time there. He was essential in forming my intellectual sensibilities in ways that are only just becoming apparent to me. The university provided me with a graduate research stipend that was essential to my existence and the Department of Comparative Literature was an exceptional place to expand my knowledge of literature. It was also at University College London that I formed truly mean- ingful friendships with a group of talented and exceptional individuals. My life would be unthinkable without the sage advice and reason of Delphine Grass, someone I can rely on for both criticism and support. The memory of our many conversations about literature, art, and life sus- tain me when we don’t have the luxury of time to speak at great length. Zbigniew Wojnowski supported me by responding to even the smallest concerns and anxieties with a unique combination of humour and seri- ousness. Moreover, he was always ready to challenge whatever idea I put forward, which was frustrating but also illuminating. Gesche Ipsen was viii Acknowledgments such an enthusiastic supporter of my project and tirelessly read every draft of this book. Alex Nice always managed to talk to me about difficult and impossible themes in ways that were inspirational and influential. Most importantly, to these friends, thank you for the many adventures we have shared together. I would also like to thank the wonderful Jessica Copley and Rosa Van Den Beemt, who listened patiently and kindly to me ramble on about the book throughout endless evenings in Toronto. Very warm thanks also to Kate Holland and Christina Kramer, who are, first and foremost, close friends but also my unofficial mentors. Their advice will benefit me for many years to come. As this book project drew to a close, Naomi Nattrass Moses and Zev Moses read various drafts with a keen editorial eye for infelicitous mistakes in expression and tone. They’re an incom- parable and uncompromising linguistic duo who deserve my thanks not only for their editing but also for making me enjoy the search for the right expression. The team at the University of Toronto Press has been incredible to work with. Special thanks to Richard Ratzlaff, my editor at the press, who was always incredibly generous with his time and counsel. I am very grateful for the serious work done by the anonymous reviewers whose criticism helped me think through individual sections. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Charles Stuart, whose copy editing truly helped polish the manuscript at its final stages of preparation. Finally, my sister Jelena and my parents Ljuba and Dragan have provided endless support and enthusiasm – and a good dose of pragmatism – to every single endeavour I have ever attempted. To them, I owe everything. WRITING THE YUGOSLAV WARS Introduction I. “The city seemed to me – and I described it so in the book – like a post- modern work, an object of art, a photograph or piece of cloth.”1 What is surprising about this sentence is that it describes a city under siege – broken, razed, and ruined – as possessing the mask of artistic creation. In Semezdin Mehmedinovic´’s Sarajevo blues, a volume of war writing that is at its core a work of testimony of survival during the modern-day siege of Sarajevo, there is a strong concern with the idea of the art of destruc- tion. This collection expresses a conscious conflict between the pursuit of truthfulness as an ethical matter and the pursuit of an aestheticized representation of a besieged city. The ambiguity and tension exposed by the demands of the witness genre in the hands of an author with a propensity for figurative language point towards a fruitful line of analysis: how does war, either despite or because of its tragedy, become literary? Beginning in 1991, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was torn apart by a series of violent conflicts. The long years of war resulted in many records of the tragic events produced by diverse observers and participants, but none are as discordant as the prose and poetry by literary authors who, in critiquing the war as a political and ideological cataclysm, also approached the event as an aesthetically constructive force. War literature in general confirms the radical power of violence to harness the human imagination and to enable artistic creation when so much of social, physical, and psychological existence is being destroyed. On the whole, war writing thrives on the contradiction that war is an event demanding trenchant assessment and an opportunity to suspend (or re-evaluate) commonly shared artistic values. In subsequent chapters, 4 Writing the Yugoslav Wars I focus on the following query: what does the production of literature during war communicate about the values presumed to reside in art and aesthetics? To put it more directly: working with the assumption that violence is correlated to aesthetic transformation insofar as it shatters the known world and ways of perceiving it, what challenges are presented to literary forms of expression in the case of Yugoslavia’s dissolution? The assumption that historical rupture and social crisis beget formal innova- tion is a commonly accepted view, frequently foregrounded by scholars of war literature, and theorized most thoroughly in trauma discourses. The literary and artistic debates surrounding the two world wars – the two most devastating and widespread modern conflicts – exemplify this strongly: In the early twentieth century, art responded to a great war so shattering that it required new forms of expression and engendered theoretical and institutional controversies over the priorities of aesthetics and pity. But when combat targeted civilians in World War II and regimes murdered entire populations of cities and communities, art – like the world itself – stood aghast. Bafflement over how to speak this magnitude of manmade violence was overtaken by bafflement overif one can speak, or should speak, the unspeakable at all. The artistic challenges posed by World War II were recognized as foundational ethical challenges to the functions and prerogatives of art itself.2 The implicit statement is that new aesthetic forms are coeval with new wars. But worth noting here is Margot Norris’s insight (given fuller articulation in her book) that the structure of each particular war – its technologi- cal prowess, its organization, its rationality – generates problems of form in the subsequent human articulation of its ethical and social repercussions. In the twentieth century, the magnitude of mass death demanded revised philosophical and aesthetic systems. In the later decades of the last century, one distinct quality that characterized the experience and awareness of distant wars was the immediately mediated knowledge of them. It is not the novelty of the mediation that matters here, but rather its processes, framing, and formatting. I frequently return to some of the implications that this accelerated media landscape has for the literary text. Literary matters – whether of crisis or evolution – were just as central to writers experiencing the violent, tragic dissolution of Yugoslavia as were matters of testifying to the experience of war.

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