Interviewed by: Ivana Golijanin
Darko Cvijetić's upcoming appearance at the Bookstan international literature festival is more than a good reason to talk with the author about his latest novel , Previše mi to. Eight girls, which reflects Cvijetić's world present in his overall literary work, but which also introduces us to some other parts of the past and confronts us with ourselves.
The main character of your new novel, the war criminal, Filip Latinović, officially convicted of crimes against humanity in The Hague, after eighteen years of imprisonment in Norway, returns to his hometown, in Bosnia, completely different and a believer. To his horror he becomes a hero. How did you approach writing the novel? Where did the idea for such a character, an anti-hero, come from?
The idea came to me from the nightmare of a penitent facing the nightmare of a victim. Or, even worse, out of dismay that someone will record the penitent's approach to God, tailor, create a story that is contrary to the full-blooded speech of archived facts about a banal murderer...Filip could certainly have been the one who believed he was doing good, and responded to the name Darko Cvijetić or anyone else. But that one will create a story, and it should have remained "just our thing". In approaching the idea, I was also interested in how, by what process, the crossing of two times of different temporalities takes place: the penitent's time, which shows that it is possible in prison (where the flow of time is completely slowed down) to have a progression of ethics and morality, as opposed to the victim's time (which shows that it is possible to stay in place in the normal course of time, or even regress) embedded in one and only ethics. The two times therefore touch in Philip's return. The nightmare of a penitent seeking forgiveness. (And how many are there who will forgive? What actually awaits him at the "Kaptol station" on that morning of arrival?) And the nightmare of the indifferent and the victims, which has become equal. Who do not have the power to forgive. That is the moment when Filip arrives.
Being Filip Latinović is very scary, it is repeated. Arriving at the Kaptol station in Krležina Filip evokes memories, he returns to find himself, and what triggers the return in your character?
Asking for forgiveness. No one can live unless he is forgiven. He thinks we will forgive him. That is for the reader to decide. And it's very scary. Shame can be absent.
The novel has an interesting structure; namely, a former camp guard of the Republika Srpska army, Latinović's schoolmate, writes the pages of this book from Latinović's notes from prison, including many intertextual places in which, in addition to Krleža, Dostoevsky, Hannah Arendt, Nietzsche, and so on are mentioned. Can we say more about that?
Yes, it's a mirror. As soon as we look at another, we see ourselves. The face of the one who records is turned to the face of the one who betrayed. (The Belgrade edition of the novel by the Rašić Book Workshop has on the cover a fragment of a painting by G. Serodine from 1625 - Saints Peter and Paul facing each other. The one who published and the one who records). That image is very important to me because they both betray what really happened. How and when do we actually forgive ourselves? And who are we then?
Your Filip Latinović identifies himself with Rodion Raskolnikov, from Crime and Punishment. After his encounter with God and the Judgment, he actually realizes that he committed crimes because he wanted freedom. But sin is also one of the possibilities of freedom, it is a freely made, but wrong choice – which Latinović undoubtedly makes. For Dostoevsky, love is the only true way to use freedom, but what kind of freedom did Latinović want and what did he get? What have we all gained in these thirty years after the war?
Yes, Philip saw his way in Raskolnikov's gesture of falling on his knees, asking for the grace of forgiveness and accepting the punishment. But what kind of world does Rodion Romanovich find?! The world of Bolsheviks, traitors, Enkavede people... In that world, he is a hero (who killed a bourgeois woman with an ax, and her sister, who also saved an underage prostitute), and everywhere his image is smeared, and everywhere his betrayal is interpreted as heroism. There is a similar parallel with Philip, who is falsely forgiven - in the name of the ethnic group. Except for the mother. Except for the son. Except the woman. Except the Son. Then who is Darko to forgive?
"It doesn't matter who you are. The one who reads will determine whether you are a Philip (because we are all Philip) or a hero (because a hero has no mural but a noose)," the novel says. Why does it not matter who is who in the novel or how to read this book at all? What is the relationship between fiction and fact in it?
It doesn't matter who you are, because each of us can be evil ourselves. The reader decides everything. The balance of good and evil in him will determine his reader's point of view. "That's our hero" is a thought that reads completely differently from the reader for whom it is just a criminal who has served his sentence. These are traps and narrative strategies. The relationship between faction and fiction is also a game that everyone can measure as they can. Truth has no value in the world of ideas. Ideas question truth. Slowing down the making of a judgment without "disassembly". It amazes me how excellent Polish or Italian readers of Schindler's Elevator unlock the novel, completely devoid of the national smearing of the characters, and see what is the basis - a style that escapes the familiar folder, and looks for a zero point, all in order to tell a story. Short and terrible.
This novel seems like a continuation of your previous two short novels (Schindler's Elevator and What you sleep on the floor). How are these books related?
They are certainly connected, they are three mourning games, Benjamin would say. The completion is ahead of us - the final part of the trilogy Schindler's Elevator , What on the floor are you sleeping on and It's too much for me. Eight girls. One sword notch at a time that happens to coincide with my life. I am the only one who can testify that I was, the evil one, or the good one from the ninth, the creator of the fiction of the mythology of the Red Solitaire and its surroundings. Now I will mention the quote from Dubravka Ugrešić and the "dirty thought that many people are actually excited by the situation of war". Yes, I can slowly drift away now. It's time for fairy tales, I'll repeat it later.
You pay a lot of attention to language in your entire literary work, and this novel is no exception. Where do you draw strength and inspiration for these linguistic, poetic, games? Is it easier this way than writing pure poetry?
Language is all I have. That is why I pay all my attention to it, the attempt to save it from wild use, from partialization, from the vulgarization of Newspeak, which in the past thirty-five years has reduced it to mumbling, stuttering and typing, fragmentation... Language has diminished, adapted to a dehumanized time. It needs to be recreated, stripped of the layers left on it by decades of militarization, misuse of meaning and violent recoding into the narrative of the masses. That is a huge job. P. Celan paid for such a job in German with his life. It is said that every second in a film has 24 images, to quote Kieślowski. So I believe that every word has, let's say, 24 meanings, so if a sentence is a frame, we have entire movements in one, any statement. But we live in an age of images and symbols, words are disappearing, and one morning we will wake up mute...
Latinović's grandson, twelve-year-old Senad, nicknamed Kost, killed eight girls and a school guard with a firearm. There are clear allusions to the horrific massacre that took place in Belgrade last year, but Kost also becomes a hero like his grandfather, t-shirts with his image are sold, he becomes an object of worship. What did you try to suggest with these (family) ties that outgrow the family itself and are transgenerational traumas really so deeply rooted in these spaces and these people?
The ultimate limit has long been moved and it seems that we are no longer able to distinguish between good and evil. Constantly and repeatedly revising history, we got almost entirely schizoid results, with which no step forward is possible. Forgiveness is the key word, to which all religions and all politics refer, but it is nowhere to be found. An unforgiving society quickly turns into a cannibalistic dance where anything is possible. Violence has overwhelmed us at every juncture of life. A special shock is the violence among children, which promises an anarchic image of the future! Humanism, decency, forgiveness - all this has been expelled from the value system and pure aggression remains as a desirable model of behavior... Filip and Kost or Darko and Senka, piles of corpses and repentance and forgiveness as unworthy emotions. I tried to shed light on the matrix of general aggressiveness, the lack of empathy even among girls and boys, and the world of emotional stunting... After all, the trilogy is the same theme. It seems that more important things have been written on neighborhood walls about this topic than in books. Dežulović brilliantly called it the "mural vertical of society"!
Whose history is it that we lived, that the characters of your book lived? What are the parameters for an "objective" judgment of the past and what is the world from the past that you write about, not only here, but also in your entire literary oeuvre?
It is the history of a sunken world and a broken basic morality. The world we dismantled, very systematically, very meticulously, depriving our offspring of basic decency. From the ruins of that world emerge my characters, my apparitions, fears, impotence, frostbite (both from hatred and from cold) and there is no parameter that would be an invitation to objective judgment... These are mostly destroyed and humiliated characters, creatures made of sunken expectations, icy horrors, gunpowder charges from which dark incense smokes. Fragments of people remained, blind fragments, skeletons peeking out of the desolate, increasingly desolate land.
Can the past heal or reconcile us?
Obviously it can't, we even feed on very carefully selected details of the past that keep us in a constant position of victim. A favorite sport in all meridians, but which we have brought to championship heights. We need to be reminded again and again that we are clay and that we are clay, that a gentle rain shower can wash us away.
Another genocide is happening before our eyes and changes for the worse are becoming more and more certain. How do you deal with this anxiety and do you think we can learn something from it all?
It happens continuously, always, forever, and not one genocide, but the unceasing condition of the human race is planned killing. Killing people is perfected, and indifference to killing is even more perfected. Retreat is the only defense, internal migration, as has already been said so many times. No, we can't learn anything, because we didn't come out of everything any different, not at all... And I've had enough of everything, and I'm planning a serious withdrawal from the so-called of public action, because it is too toxic and destructive... I will stop publishing manuscripts, at least for a while, I need, and have been advised, a serious break. I want to get back to reading and silent writing (I just finished writing a play), note-taking and a quieter life. The last few years have made me terribly tired and I need a retreat... After all, "write fairy tales, my grandmother said", says my character from the play What you sleep on the floor . I need peace, fairytale, and... a ton of silence.
It feels like a great responsibility to write with such awareness on these topics and I admire you all over again. Finally, the novel will be presented at the Bookstan literary festival organized by the Buybook publishing house every July. How important are literary festivals to you and how does Bookstan influence the domestic and regional scene?
First of all, thank you very much for the encouraging words, and then thank you for the invitation to talk! I would also like to thank the incredible Mrs. Lada Jurković, director of the Zagreb branch of Buybook , as well as editor Jagna Pogačnik and proofreader Nela Mindoljević, without whom the third part of the trilogy would not have seen the light of day. Yes, the novel will be presented at Bookstan (which is organized every year by dear Buybook ), through a conversation with the excellent and great Selvedin Avdić. Bookstan is certainly one of the best regional literary festivals, and an opportunity to meet writers from all over the world, but also to give birth within the workshops to a whole new discourse of critical thinking, of observing writing as a phenomenon that survives despite everything, and that in a world from which the word is increasingly decapitated and banished. In emoticons.