“For the holidays, they burst with pork and lamb roasts, stuffed cabbage, and boiled pig’s feet. The television and radio programs for those days are like broadcasts from provincial taverns. Truck drivers’ songs ring out, hiccuping and burping reverberate, and comedians offer advice for how to cure hangovers. Instead of antacids they recommend brine. Once they’ve had their fill of food and drink, they strike up a circle dance. The radio and television sets wobble, the kitchen credenza trembles with glasses that are never set out on the table! When Ćira married, he used up a whole tub of lard. For centuries they have been dreaming of a tub of lard, the lard drips down their whiskers, dribbles into their dream.”
Putnik holds forth on the servile nature of their “countrymen” and their “terrifying” capacity to adapt to things (“There is nothing they won’t learn to live with”). He senses the virulence of hatred (“Their malice has drawn into a clench around their lips, it has settled in their pupils, nestled into their speech”); he is appalled at its force (“Nothing will save you. Not a single public success, no honor, no riches or glory, nothing will give you safe haven”); its longevity (“They have long memories, they are waiting to pay back in kind, they will wait a hundred years for the opportunity. They exact their revenge even from the innocent, only so that they can knock the evil out of themselves”); and the fact that it cannot be rooted out. “The word for hate, mrzeti, is too strong. Our people have come up with a word that is more endearing, more heartfelt: mrzančiti. I assume you haven’t heard it, and I doubt you’ll find a true parallel in English. Mrzančiti means to exude hatred, to hate in quiet, long, and with determination, in keeping with tradition, for no reason in particular.”
The Metaphysical Palanka
Danojlić’s novel is close kin to another book, published earlier, the 400-page long philosophical essay The Philosophy of the Palanka (Filozofija palanke, 1969) by the Serbian philosopher Radomir Konstantinović. While Danojlić’s novel is more or less forgotten today, the Philosophy of the Palanka was and remains a cult book. Konstantinović promoted a new concept, he gave a new, more complex meaning to the old word palanka. The palanka is not a village or a city, it is somewhere between the two. The palanka is a de-territorialized and de-contextualized place, everywhere and nowhere, a state of mind, afloat between “tribal spirit, as ideal-unique, and world spirit, as ideal-open.” The palanka experiences itself as cast-off, forgotten, time left out of historical time, and then it bemoans its bitter fate, while at the same time turning this accursed destiny into its privilege. Being closed and forgotten meant being safe, while beyond, outside the circle of the palanka, rules the dangerous chaos of the wide world. Rigidity, petrification, a constant readiness for defense, a strong tribal awareness, infantilism, formulaic patterns of thought, fear of the unknown, fear of change, an apology for purity, innocence, and simplicity, the hermetic, a cult of the dead, security, normativity, conservatism, the static, anti-historicism — are only a few of the features typical of the world of the palanka. Konstantinović does not see the root of Serbian fascism in imitation of the German fascist model, or of any other for that matter, but instead he sees it in the palanka. The palanka is the model for Ur-fascism.
The Feast of the Periphery
One of the outcomes of the collapse of Yugoslavia, the wars, and new nationalistic state projects is the destruction of what had been the shared Yugolsav cultural space, the material destruction of culture (schools, cultural monuments, libraries, book burning, etc.), vandalism (the demolition of statues), and effacement of cultural segments (for instance, the era of Yugoslav culture). Every state that disappeared from the former Yugoslavia has reconfigured its own national culture. In the tumultuous process of reconfiguration, there are creative figures, works, opuses that have been dropped, some forgotten, some abruptly jettisoned, others degraded, de-throned, yet others over-valued in terms of the current national ideology and interests. There have been bad writers and artists in this time of over-inflating national culture who have been elevated to aesthetic heights merely because they were Croatian, Serbian, or Bosnian patriots. In the less than twenty years that the new states have existed on what was the territory of the former Yugoslavia, the cultural landscape has grown grayer, it has narrowed, and become provincial.
The dependent domestic media work to regurgitate political clichés which they have retrieved from nineteenth century political dustbins, and the crazed crowd soaks these up as if they are God’s own truth. The domestic media and local politicians prattle on in a delirium about the national state, the ethnically pure and impure peoples, patriotism, heroism, defense of the homeland and patriotic honor, the enemy, his crimes against us, the national identity which had always been suppressed. Meanwhile, the foreign media exercise their almost knee-jerk colonialism, cranking out colonial clichés which ring true and convincing to their readers. They write of the terrible, wild, abandoned, uncivilized Balkans, communist repression, the consequence of which is a struggle of the little peoples for national identity and independence, while at the same time reinforcing the old mental divisions of Europe into its civilized western part and its wild, uncivilized eastern part. Here, of course, is the primitive, exotic, and bloodthirsty child — the Balkans.
Hence cultural texts are formed. The cultural text is a construct which assumes not only material factual culture but many written pages and miles of celluloid. The cultural text is a sort of meta-text. Metropoli create large and productive cultural texts. Vienna is one such cultural text. The Balkans are a cultural text. Kakania is a cultural text. The provinces are a cultural text.
The center is inclusive, the periphery exclusive; the center communicates, the periphery excommunicates; the center is multi-national, the periphery mono-national; the center is like a sponge, the periphery like stone. Whatever the case, the provinces are an inseparable part of the story of the metropolis, just as the center is an inseparable part of the story of the periphery. Only together do they make sense.
Fluorescent Fishermen
Some ten years ago, I cannot recall precisely when, I was out strolling along the Donauinsel during a visit to Vienna. The weather was warm, the shore studded with dozens of little restaurants, and the Viennese were out dancing the salsa. The warm summer evening, the swaying bodies, and the sound of Latin American salsa were nicely incongruous with the image of Vienna on the “beautiful, blue Danube.” I saw something unusual on the shore: three figures wearing helmets, with beaming flashlights affixed, holding fishing rods and casting fluorescent lines into the water. The image of the glowing figures with their glowing fishing rods struck me, especially because I soon learned that these were my countrymen, just as in the old jokes — a Croat, a Serb, and a Bosnian. It turned out that they lived in Vienna and spent every weekend fishing on the Danube. I nibbled some cheese pastry with them, sipped brandy straight from the bottle (the real homemade stuff, plum brandy). Around us swirled the sensual strains of the salsa.