Miljenko Jergovic's art of memory: lying, imagining, and forgetting in Mama Leone and Historijska Citanka.

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-APR-04

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Miljenko Jergovic is one of the contemporary writers from the former Yugoslavia who has devoted a large part of his recent work to the problem of memory and forgetting in a radically changed and changing world. This article examines how the processes of trauma, fantasy, and remembering have been inscribed in two of his works, Mama Leone and Historijska citanka, and how the combination of these texts' narrative playfulness and their desire for memory creates a memory text that produces a highly ambiguous access to the past.

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Zaborav nimalo ne boli, ali je ipak lijepo sjecati se. U sjecanju su svi razlozi, i za radost i za tugu, a oni su cesto isti. (1) (Miljenko Jergovic)

The recent Yugoslav wars, resulting in a great deal of physical destruction of the countries involved and their peoples, were one of those events that can be rightly called 'cataclysmic', following Stephan Feuchtwang's definition of that word as 'a limit condition: the annihilation of history and the destruction of personality'. (2) They have brought about a sea change in the collective consciousness, new interpretations of both distant and recent history (or histories) of the region, new institutions, habits, and modes of thought. (3) Life 'before the war' and life 'after the war' seem to be separated by an almost unbridgeable, deeply traumatic abyss of violence, betrayal of trust, and, very often, separation from one's home, family, and friends. For many who have lost their homes, either in the literal sense or in a broader, sometimes more problematic, sense of having lost the familiar surroundings in which they have grown up or built their lives, in which they developed their mental habits and attitudes, the question of where to go next seems to be closely bound up with the question of identity and personal biography. Physical destruction of towns and villages has also meant the disappearance of what Raphael Samuel calls the 'mnemonic landscape'; (4) both the physical destruction and political changes have brought about the disappearance of many 'sites (or places) of memory' (Pierre Nora's lieux de memoire) (5) which helped create and maintain both collective historical memory and identity, and the more intimate, personal ones. Just as the states have lost or changed their symbols and national monuments, so have individuals been faced with the destruction of their own private memory places, of objects and environments that marked their past lives and served as mnemonic devices of their personal biographies. Can we still remember our childhood as fully if the sensory stimulants for our memory are gone, if we can no longer recall the sights and sounds and smells of our past lives, and the physical objects which could remind us of them are no longer in existence? In other words, can we retrieve the personal past from the depths of our forgetful minds without the equivalent of Proust's madeleine? What Susannah Radstone says about Richard Terdiman's view of the nineteenth-century 'memory crisis', which, as she puts it, 'erupted in response to a profound sense of cultural and historical dislocation', (6) can easily be applied to contemporary Bosnia (and the former Yugoslavia as a whole):

it was the perceived discontinuities between the past and the future which lay at the heart of the memory crisis. In part, this was a crisis prompted by fears that the past embodied in cultural memory was irretrievably lost; in part, it was a crisis prompted by anxieties about the unbidden eruption of that past in the present's shaping of the future. (7)

Although much scholarly attention has been dedicated to changes in the national identities in the region, the problem of both the intimate, personal memory and of the unofficial, popular collective memory has, to my knowledge, been left within the realms of the personal (among friends and families) and the unofficial (playful newspaper and magazine columns and websites). (8) Recent literature of the region appears as yet another terrain where this concern with personal and popular memory makes itself visible, and in this paper I wish to investigate the treatment of memory in two recent works (a novel and a collection of short essays) by Miljenko Jergovic, a Bosnian/Croatian writer whose entire post-war opus seems to me to be permeated with an intense interest in the processes of remembering and forgetting. (9) It is not, however, just the specifically ex-Yugoslav significance of these works that should interest us primarily here, for Jergovic is an author whose near obsession with memory seems to provide us with an important literary contribution to the development of memory research that so many disciplines within the humanities have focused on in recent years. (10) The ex-Yugoslav 'memory crisis' seems to have coincided with the explosion of memory studies in the humanities, and I intend to show the high level of awareness of the issues involved that one finds in Jergovic's texts, as well as the original contribution they offer to the debate in their literary (and thus discursively highly sophisticated) capacity.

'A History Reader'

Historijska citanka (A History Reader), whose first two sentences serve as an epigraph to this paper, and which first appeared as a regular column in the Sarajevo weekly Dani, is a collection of intimate and knowingly nostalgic recollections of pre-war Sarajevo (and the former Yugoslavia as whole), treating a vast range of everyday habits, objects, public and semi-public personalities, and character types that marked Sarajevo of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It bases its title on a type of supplementary history textbook used in schools in the same period, which complemented the historical narrative of the basic textbooks with their collections of excerpts from important historical documents (ranging from state documents to travel writing), photographs of historical monuments, and the like. Jergovic's Historijska citanka, in its original form as a regular column in a weekly, by its evocative title seemed to suggest a project of producing an alternative history, a history of everyday life and the recent past (well within living memory) which would address such 'insignificant' phenomena as children's games, neighbourhood gossip, or what type of sandwich was taken on day trips. As such, it appeared as an antidote to the grand historical narratives that stood behind nationalist discourse, and that tended to view individuals' lives in the context of centuries (rather than lifespans) and collective identities such as narod ('people' or 'nation' rather than the more intimate and immediate communities such as family, neighbourhood, or town). It is as if Historijska citanka proposes a literary version of the early oral history programme, which was clearly voiced by Paul Thompson in The Voice of the Past:

Since the nature of most existing records is to reflect the standpoint of authority, it is not surprising that the judgement of history has more often than not vindicated the wisdom of the powers that be. Oral history by contrast makes a much fairer trial possible: witnesses can now be called from the under-classes, the unprivileged, and the defeated. It provides a more realistic and fair reconstruction of the past, and challenge to the established account. (11)

In its newspaper column version, Historijska citanka appeared as a project complementary to The Lexicon of YU-Mythology (Leksikon YU-mitologije), a website founded by Dubravka Ugresic and a couple of her students in Amsterdam. (12) The link with Ugresic's work is an important one, because she is yet another ex-Yugoslav author whose recent work has focused on the problem of memory in ways that seem similar to Jergovic's, but the final effect and the logic behind it are rather different, and the contrast with Ugresic makes Jergovic's 'memory work' all the more interesting.

Based on the idea that the popular culture and the memories and habits of everyday life in pre-war ex-Yugoslavia were disappearing without trace in the post-war and post-disintegration period, the Lexicon website issued...

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