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Ivo Andrić: Against National Mythopoesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2018

Marina Antić
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Abstract

The national narrative spun around Ivo Andrić has held firm in both academic circles and popular imagination, despite several comprehensive attempts at correcting appropriations of his oeuvre for national narratives. This article critiques nationalist readings of Andrić by showing how in his most famous novel, The Bridge on the Drina, key passages most often associated with nationalist appropriation speak against rather than for national mythopoesis. Antić does so by re-focusing on the literary rather than historiographic reading of the novel, which is to say, by analyzing narrative strategies that illuminate Andrić’s resistance to nineteenth-century romantic nationalism. In particular, Antić focuses on the scene of Radisav's impalement in order to unravel its many misinterpretations, from those that see in this scene the portrayal of Serbian national victimization and thus a justification for the 1990s genocidal war, to the ones that stay within the fictional text but still overlook ways in which Andrić qualifies the mythical/epic view of Radisav's execution. Antić shows instead that Andrić uses this scene, among others in this novel, to disrupt epic narrative models that underwrite much of South Slavic national invention of tradition, and thus challenge rather than affirm national(istic) models of Bosnian history.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 77 , Issue 3 , Fall 2018 , pp. 704 - 725
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2018 

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References

1. Stanišić, Saša, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, trans. Bell, Anthea (New York, 2008), 205–6Google Scholar.

2. Milutinović, Zoran, Getting over Europe: The Construction of Europe in Serbian Culture (Amsterdam, 2011), 205–24Google Scholar.

3. Andrić, Ivo, The Bridge on the Drina, trans. Edwards, Lovett F. (Chicago, 1977), 17Google Scholar. I will follow Edwards’ translation with minor modifications.

4. Oral epic poetry referenced here is the indigenous oral literary genre in former Yugoslavia. It is written in a recognizable decasyllabic verse; features well-known heroes like the two named here, often in battle with equally recognizable villains; and a number of set, recognizable stylistic devices, including the so-called Slavic antithesis. Traditionally performed accompanied by the one-string gusle instrument, the genre slowly died out in its oral form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Oral epic poetry has played a crucial rule in the construction of national narratives in former Yugoslavia in the nineteenth century, most notably following Vuk Karadžić’s collection and publication of these poems. In a Herderian Volk spirit, the national movements that would develop over the course of the century understood the epic poetry as an instantiation of the (South) Slavic spirit and thus, the basis for a national “reawakening.” For an excellent analysis of how oral epic poetry came to play such a prominent role in national narratives in and around Bosnia, see Hajdarpašić, Edin, Whose Bosnia: Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 (Ithaca, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Nationalist conceptions of literature, per Enver Kazaz’s succinct formulation, “take the nation and its identity as the main character of literary-historical narration.” Literature, in turn, becomes a “national spiritual discipline,” unimaginable without a nation and its very own, distinct language. The language-literature-nation triad is as unbreakable as it is circular. See Kazaz, Enver, “Terminološka zbrka (Bosanskohercegovačka književna historija i studij književnosti u raljama političkih ideologija)” Razlika/Diff èrance: Časopis za kritiku i umjetnost teorije, no. 2 (2001)Google Scholar, at https://www.scribd.com/document/123471274/Kazaz-Terminoloska-zbrka (last accessed June 11, 2018).

6. Moretti, Franco, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez trans. Hoare, Quintin (London, 1996)Google Scholar.

7. See for example, Žanić, Ivo “Pisac na osami: Upotreba Andrićeve književnosti u ratu u Bosni i Hercegovini,” Erasmus: Časopis za kulturu demokracije, no. 18 (November 1996): 48–57Google Scholar; Kazaz, Enver, “Egzistencijalnost/povijesnost Bosne—Interpretacija u zamci ideologije” Novi izraz: Časopis za književnu i umjetničku kritiku, no. 10–11 (2001): 120–36Google Scholar; Hawkesworth, Celia, “Ivo Andrić as Red Rag and Political Football,” The Slavonic and East European Review 80, no. 2 (April 2002): 201–16Google Scholar.

8. Mehmed Pasha Sokollu (1506–1579), the inspiration for Andrić’s character, was a well-known Ottoman vizier hailing from Bosnia, who, having risen through the ranks, ruled with the title of Grand Vizier from 1565 until his death.

9. Vučković, Radovan, “Andrićeva priča o stradalničkom narodu.” reprinted in Andrić: Paralele i recepcija (Belgrade, 2006), 83–98Google Scholar; Rizvić, Muhsin, Bosanski Muslimani u Andrićevu svijetu (Sarajevo, 1995)Google Scholar.

10. Vučković, “Andrićeva priča,” 86–88, emphasis added.

11. Kazaz, “Egzistencijalnost,” 121.

12. Ibid.

13. Compare such readings with, for example, the role two composed epic poems played in constructions of Herderian nationalist mythology: Ivan Mažuranić’s The Death of Smail-Aga and Petar Petrović Njegoš’s The Mountain Wreath. The nationalist readings of Andrić take him as a continuation of this epic tradition, rather than its overcoming. For an analysis of how even Njegoš’s poem is often misread as a political justification of nationalist expansion, see Pavlović, Srđa “The Mountain Wreath: Poetry or a Blueprint for the Final Solution?” Space of Identity 1, no. 4 (December 2001)Google Scholar at www.soi.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/soi/article/view/8038/16949 (last accessed June 11, 2018).

14. Ibid., 122, emphasis in original. Treatment of Andrić’s fictional output as history is also evident in a number of other cases, including the conflation of historical and fictional figures of 19th–century Sarajevo, as I’ve argued in “Historicizing Bosnia: Kosta Hörmann and Bosnia’s Encounter with Modernity,” in Ruthner, Clemens, Cordileone, Diana Reynolds, Reber, Ursula and Detrez, Raymond, eds., WechselWirkungen: Austria-Hungary, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Western Balkans, 1878–1918 (New York, 2015), 331–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Žanić, “Pisac na osami,” 57.

16. For a sampling of relatively recent commentary in this vein, see, for example, among others, Charles Crawford on the short story “A Letter from 1920” in “Bosnia’s Irreconcilable Principles,” TransConflict, July 24, 2012 at www.transconflict.com/2012/07/bosnias-irreconcilable-principles-247/ (last accessed June 11, 2018), or Lambeth, Benjamin S. on The Bridge on the Drina in NATO’s Air War Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment (Santa Monica, 2001), 5Google Scholar; or Milorad Dodik on reading Andrić to understand life in Bosnia in “Dodik: Kad imam vremena čitam Andrića da lakše shvatim život u BiH” in Poskok International Edition, June 28, 2012 at www.poskok.info/dodik-kad-imam-vremena-citam-andrica-da-lakse-shvatim-zivot-u-bih/ (last accessed June 11, 2018); and many more. Even a cursory search of Ivo Andrić will turn up a plethora of articles in the popular press that reference Andrić in relation to the 1990s Yugoslav wars.

17. Hawkesworth, “Ivo Andrić as Red Rag,” 205.

18. Kazaz, “Egzistencijalnost,” 136.

19. Ibid.

20. Wachtel, Andrew, “Imagining Yugoslavia: The Historical Archeology of Ivo Andrić,” in Vucinich, Wayne S., ed., Ivo Andrić Revisited: The Bridge Still Stands (Berkeley, 1995), 85Google Scholar.

21. Ibid., 94.

22. For more on close reading as a modernist reading practice see Jameson’s, Fredric A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London, 2013)Google Scholar.

23. Žanić, “Pisac an osami,” 53.

24. As quoted in Žanić, “Pisac na osami,” 55. The reference is to the so-called Martinović case—a Kosovar Serb found sodomized by a glass bottle near Gnjilane, and, in particular, Brana Crnčević’s reformulation of the injuries sustained by Martinović from sodomization by bottle to “impalement by a stake packaged in a bottle.” Others went even further in proposing psychological explanations for the prevalence of this image in nationalist propaganda, but I find even Žanić’s argument to be stretching the effects. See, in particular, Boose, Lynda E. “Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (Fall 2002): 71–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as one of the only publications that cites almost the entire scene from the novel.

25. I am using epic here to denote two key features as will become clear shortly: Radisav’s supposed epic martyrdom on the one hand, and formal epic narrative features on the other, including a “distant” third person narrative, interrupted or constructed through narrative digressions that connect, in the end, into a grand, sweeping view of history perceptible only from some imaginary Andrićesque “Olympus.” For more on the epic mode in Andrić, see especially Lešić, Zdenko, Pripovjedači: Ćorović, Kočić, Andrić, Samokovlija, Humo (Sarajevo, 1988)Google Scholar.

26. Dark-vilayet (tamnovilajetski) is an adjective naming the typical Orientalist reading of Bosnia during the Ottomans as the barbaric heart of darkness of the Balkan Peninsula. Zdenko Lešić traces this type of reading to Isidora Sekulić’s influential article “Istok u pripovetkama Iva Andrića” in Pripovjedači, 174. On Sekulić’s reading of Andrić see also Longinović, Tomislav, “East within the West: Bosnian Cultural Identity in the Works of Ivo Andrić” in Vucinich, Wayne S., ed., Ivo Andrić Revisited: The Bridge Still Stands (Berkeley, 1995), 123–38Google Scholar.

27. Lešić, Pripovjedači, 141.

28. Andrić, The Bridge, 24.

29. Ibid.

30. Rizvić, Bosanski Muslimani, 172.

31. Andrić, The Bridge, 25.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., 25–26. Emphasis added.

34. Ibid., 26.

35. Ibid.

36. There are numerous hints about death and crossing into the otherworld in the passages describing the ferryman. Andrić references several mythologies and their respective ferrymen controlling the afterworld: like Charon in Greek mythology, he is in a foul mood, gigantic and strong, unkempt, and cranky. Like Malik in Islamic mythology, Jamak never smiles; like Dea Tacita in Roman mythology, he is the personification of the terror of obscurity. Blackness alludes to Ancient Slavic Chernobog, while the name itself—Jamak—refers to a Persian mythological character, a God of death and hell in Hindu, Persian, and even Buddhist traditions.

37. The question of empire, and in particular, the legacy of the Ottoman Empire in constructions of Balkan identity, is a topic well beyond the scope of this paper. One of the most significant interventions is Todorova’s, Maria Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar, which effectively inspired an entire scholarly subdiscipline. I engaged this subject (and the discipline’s intellectual trajectory) in some detail in my dissertation, but the present work is attempting a shift in emphasis, away from imperialism and Balkanist discourse in reference to the Ottoman Empire, and towards a story of more structural features of Andrić’s Bosnia in the modern period. As will be clear shortly, I am in agreement with Zoran Milutinović who reads Andrić’s novel not as a long durée history of Višegrad, but as a story of the arrival of Austro-Hungarian empire into the region.

38. Andrić, Ivo, “Aska i vuk” in Odabrane pripovetke knj. 2 (Belgrade, 1954), 532–42Google Scholar. This fable features a young female sheep confronting death in the guise of a hungry wolf by dancing in front of him and mesmerizing him with her dance.

39. Andrić, The Bridge, 72.

40. See Leovac, Slavko, Pripovedač Ivo Andrić (Novi Sad, 1979), 186–89Google Scholar: “Everywhere and in the last instance all that remains is the suffering and humiliated man, but also time that unremittingly flows and flushes away the silt: both the terrifying and the laughable, the pathetic as well as the majestic, pain as well as joy.”

41. See Pirjevec, Dušan, “Andrićev Na Drini most,” Slavistična revija: Časopis za jezikoslovje in literarne vede 26, no. 2 (April-June 1978): 115–46Google Scholar.

42. Andrić, The Bridge, 26.

43. Andrić, The Bridge, 170.

44. Leovac, Pripovedač, 194.

45. Andrić, The Bridge, 173–75.

46. Milutinović Getting over Europe, 205–24.

47. Ibid., 217.

48. Andrić, The Bridge, 30.

49. Ibid., 34. Emphasis added.

50. Andrić identifies the singer merely as a Montenegrin and cites an epic poem about the gathering of Serbian nobles—two details that suggest an intertextual reference to Petar Petrović Njegoš and his epic poem The Mountain Wreath. In this most well-known instance of national mythopoesis in the epic key, Njegoš also opens his poema with a gathering of nobles. See Njegoš, Petar Petrović, The Mountain Wreath, trans. Mihailovic, Vasa D. (Belgrade, 1997)Google Scholar.

51. Ibid., 34. Emphasis added.

52. Ibid.

53. Vilas are the supernatural creatures from Slavic folklore, akin to fairies.

54. Ibid., 34–35.

55. The ethnic identifier Turk here has also sparked controversy as the term is used in contemporary discourse as an ethnic slur for Bosniaks. However, Andrić explicitly qualifies his use of this term in an addendum to the novel entitled Dictionary of Turkisms, Provincialisms, and Some Less-known Phrases: “All Turkish words are listed in that ordinarily irregular form and in that usually modified meaning in which they are used in everyday folk speech in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The terms Turks and Turkish are used often in the storytelling to also refer to Bosnian Muslim folk, but not, naturally, in the racial or ethnic sense, but as an incorrect but at the time customary colloquialism,” Andrić, Ivo, Sabrana dela Ive Andrića: Knjiga prva (Belgrade, 1965), 353—58Google Scholar. Whether we agree with Andrić as to how that term was used in history is of lesser importance. The author explicitly denies racial and ethnic meaning to the term and to insist on such meanings of the term within the novel is to speculate on the author’s intentions over and against textual evidence.

56. Heraci being the plural form of Herak.

57. Andrić, The Bridge, 36.

58. The Building of Skadar was one of the epic poems included in Vuk Karadžić’s collections. For an English translation see Holton, Milne and Mihailovich, Vasa D., trans. and ed., Songs of the Serbian People: From the Collections of Vuk Karadžić (Pittsburgh, 1997), 78–85Google Scholar.

59. Here is another challenge to the epic tales in Andrić: they are literally insufficient to protect the peasants from their overlords. They may soothe the peasants’ imagination but they have no effect on Abidaga.

60. Andrić, The Bridge, 47.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid., emphasis added.

63. In the previously cited article on Kosta Hörmann, I discuss at length the Austro-Hungarian empire’s forms of punishment as modern rather than medieval or feudal.

64. Andrić, The Bridge, 49.

65. Slavko Leovac described this element of the scene as well, namely, that each time the executioner is observing Radisav, we are afforded the same view. Leovac, Slavko, “Andrićeva na Drini ćuprija” Književnost no. 66 (1978): 1734–35Google Scholar.

66. Andrić, The Bridge, 49.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid., emphasis added.

70. Leovac, “Andrićeva na Drini ćuprija,” 1735.

71. I want to thank Guadalupe González Diéguez and Margaret Graves for suggesting this aspect of the theatricality of the scene.

72. Andrić, The Bridge, 50.

73. Andrić similarly plays with the notion of proximity to torture and execution of innocent peasants in his other great novel, Bosnian Chronicle. There, the crowd surrounding the execution begins to jostle and fights break out between those closest to the scene (who are attempting to avert their eyes and put some distance between them and the execution) and those behind them (who, precisely beause they do not perceive the scene directly, are thus enthralled with it and want to come closer). This push and pull in the crowd can also be read as the well-known morbid fascination with violence, a stereotypical revulsion and attraction to gruesome scenes of human destruction. Andrić, Ivo, Bosnian Chronicle, trans. Hitrec, Joseph (New York, 1963), 269–70Google Scholar.

74. Andrić, The Bridge, 50, emphasis added.

75. Ibid., 45.

76. On Radisav’s martyrdom and parallels with Christ, see also Longinović, “East within the West,” 133–34.

77. Andrić, The Bridge, 50.

78. The reference in the “still lived” is to the role of the so-called “Barbary pirates” who helped Ottomans capture the town from the Venetians. For more on the typically Mediterranean characters in Andrić see Milutinović, Getting over Europe, 225–60.

79. Andrić, The Bridge, 63.

80. Ibid.

81. Ibid., 64.

82. Lešić, Pripovjedači, 139–41.

83. Andrić, The Bridge, 16.

84. Moretti, Modern Epic. World-text is a signal to Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of world-system as Moretti will link the modern epic particularly to Wallersteinian concepts of center and peripheries in the modern world.

85. Ibid., 5.

86. Ibid., 38–39.

87. The latest intervention in debates on world literature revives Moretti’s reference to Wallerstein’s world-systems theory in proposing world-literature as the literature of the modern, capitalist world-system. Collective, Warwick Research, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature (Liverpool, 2015)Google Scholar. See also Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, 1981)Google Scholar.