I know little about the history of Yugoslavia, especially its collapse and the ensuing Balkan Wars of the 1990's.
Up untilHISTORICAL CONTEXT:
Yugoslavia
I know little about the history of Yugoslavia, especially its collapse and the ensuing Balkan Wars of the 1990's.
Up until its collapse, it was a confederation of autonomous socialist republics, analogous to the Soviet Union (although it was formally non-aligned with the USSR).
From 1953 until his death in 1980, Josip Tito was president of the federation.
Tito died shortly after his left leg was amputated, following a gangrenous infection.
I remember two generally held views or pieces of gossip from around this period.
Firstly, before his death, it was commonly believed that only Tito could have held the federation of Yugoslavia together. It came as no surprise that, after his death, the federation collapsed and disintegrated.
Secondly, after the amputation of his leg, there was supposedly a piece of graffiti, perhaps in London, that said, "Alms for the poor, legs for Tito."
Bosnia
In 1992, the protagonist of this novel was a resident of the small village of B. in Bosnia, where she was a school teacher.
Up until Tito's death, Bosnia had been the most ethnically and religiously diverse of the Yugoslav republics. In March, 1992, it held a referendum to determine whether it should declare independence from the federation. While 60% of the participants supported independence, Bosnian Serbs (who made up 30% of the overall population of Bosnia) opposed the referendum, wanting to remain in the federation of Yugoslavia (as did Serbs elsewhere in the federation).
After the referendum, hostilities broke out between Bosnians and Croatians (on the one hand), and Serbs and Bosnian Serbs (on the other hand). The Yugoslav People's Army ("JNA") took the side of the Serbs.
CRITIQUE:
Destruction of Identity
The protagonist is a Muslim woman. Her father is a Muslim engineer, and her mother is a Serb.
In the novel, she is known only as "S." We don't know her real name or her surname, nor do we know the names of other women or any of the soldiers (although their leader [who is from Serbia] is referred to as "the Captain").
Soldiers from the JNA take S. and other Muslim women to a gym in another village:
"These people seem to her unable to understand that for these armed men they are guilty simply because they exist, because they are different, because they are Muslims. And that that is reason enough for them."
Soon after, the women are bussed to a factory warehouse, what one of the soldiers calls an "exchange camp":
"In a single day we had all been reduced to the lowest possible denominator, to brute existence...
"The day seems to have gone by so quickly and the turn of events has left her no time to think."
While the women have been imprisoned in a part of the camp (known as "the women's room"), the soldiers have killed a group of men, and torched the village:
"Stories spread through the camp about torture and about the thousands of people killed in the men's camp...
"S. does not know what to make of these rumours. She's afraid that people exaggerate and invent the most horrible stories.
"You believe it only if you yourself see it. Perhaps this deliberate blindness is a form of self-preservation."
Proof of Existence
S. often takes her personal possessions out of her backpack:
"She has to prove to herself that she still exists as a person, as S., if only through her belongings. Until that summer her identity had seemed indisputable. She knew who she was, she had family and friends, a job, interests...Now, however, she is inhabiting an underground world where the rules are different. She is connected to her previous world by the slim hope that it is still possible to be the same person, but already senses the fragility of this hope, the uncertainty of her own existence.
"She feels like a cracked bowl which is slowly leaking water. Even her memories are becoming remote and inaccessible."
S. has been keeping family photographs in her backpack:
"These pictures are her strongest proof that there truly did exist a person named S., twenty-nine years of age, a graduate of the Teacher Training College, temporarily employed in the village of B. as a home-room teacher, single, 1.68 meters tall, brown hair, brown eyes, no birthmarks..."
Self-Preservation
Just as the soldiers aim to destroy the identity of the internees, they undermine their self-awareness, social-awareness, pride, self-confidence and trust in others:
"The aim is to humiliate people. The internees cease to be human beings and their bodily needs, like their bodies themselves, become part of the machinery whose workings and aim they can only guess...the first lesson of survival in a camp [is] selfishness...
"It is better not to approach the guards, not to have anything to do with them. You never know how it will end. They do not need much of an excuse to whack somebody or do something even worse than that. It is better to become invisible."
"S. notices that she no longer has a will of her own, it has been replaced by something else, as if a robot has taken control of her body, making it move and react in her stead. Again, it is happening to someone else and to her at the same time.
"If the women prisoners cannot count on one another, then there is nothing she can trust any more...It is perfectly clear to her now that she cannot trust anyone...
"What upsets her is the feeling of diminishment, impoverishment and effacement. She wonders what else she will have to give up and what is the minimum of things with which one can survive without losing the feeling that one is human?"
"...We are all infected by the camp in the some way, she thinks. Of tainted blood, we are all the same. Women exist here only in the plural now. Nameless, faceless, interchangeable. There are only two categories, young and old."
"S. sometimes forgets that there is no real solidarity here, merely the struggle for bare existence."
"Opening up inside her again is the hole that swallows up everything that is human about here."
"We're not human any more, thinks S., the camp has stopped us from feeling human."
[image] Slavenka Drakulić
Military Rape
Like all of the women in the women's room, S. is raped multiple times by guards and soldiers:
"More clearly than ever before she feels stripped of her right to herself, completely dispossessed of her own body."
"The women's room...is a storehouse of women, in a room where female bodies were stored for the use of men...This is nothing other than a soldiers' brothel...their task is to rape you...So, for them, the prisoners are garbage."
The Captain invites S. to keep him company in his quarters at least once a week, usually Saturdays. Unlike the other soldiers, the Captain is never rough with her. If the circumstances had been different, there might have been a mutual attraction. However, this is purely hypothetical. She must content herself with "an advancement in her camp status".
Motherhood
Shortly before the war ends, S. discovers that she is pregnant. She can't be sure of the identity of the father, so she assumes that it is all of the men she has slept with at the camp.
When she is taken to Stockholm as a refugee, she initially decides to offer the child up for adoption.
This means that her child, a representative of the next generation, will start without a complete identity. So war deprives multiple generations of their identity.
VERSE:
The Descent of Dread [In the Words of Slavenka Drakulić]
As darkness descends, So does the dread.
SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ PJ Harvey - "Dance on the Mountain"
"Kalashnikovs Were brought across The mountain On the back of mules They stored their weapons In a school."
I bought this book in 2019, but have only read it now, after seeing the film inspired by it
At the timCRITIQUE:
Introduction
I bought this book in 2019, but have only read it now, after seeing the film inspired by it
At the time, I googled the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, and thought I discovered an article by Thomas Pynchon (that I can no longer find online).
However, having re-read the article a few times since I read the book, I thought it expressed opinions with which I agreed. So here it is.
"Notes on Bob Dylan's Performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965" by Thomas Pynchon (A Pastiche)
In a dim way, I had been aware of Bob Dylan before I actually met him.
It must have been in 1963, sometime after Richard and Mimi Farina got married (I had known Dick at Cornell and was the best man at his second wedding.)
Dick often mentioned Bob in his occasional letters, so I recognised his name when I heard his first four albums, and then, finally, the single of "Like a Rolling Stone" (which was released on July 20, 1965).
Dick and Mimi invited me to join them at the Newport Folk Festival, which was scheduled for the weekend, a few days later.
Apart from them, the performance I was most enthusiastic about was the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. They turned me on to Chicago Blues, even though most of the band was white.
I knew that Dylan's single featured electric instrumentation, but I didn't know until the Festival that Mike Bloomfield (Butterfield's guitarist) played electric guitar on the track.
I didn't meet Bob, until after his performance on the last night, when Dick introduced me to him in the living room of the festival living quarters.
He was sitting in a corner of the room, a little deflated, but he sparked up when Dick and I walked up to him and started a conversation.
"I just want to play my music the way I want to, the way it sounds in my head. I don't want to be boxed in by other people's expectations. It's my music, not theirs," he said.
I identified with Bob's plight. I felt the same way about my writing. I had just published "V" at the time, and was still working on "The Crying of Lot 49" and "Gravity's Rainbow" (the latter of which I dedicated to Dick). I would be nothing, if I'd written these novels the way people encouraged me to, even though they were well-intentioned and, in some cases, seasoned professionals.
Even though the accounts of booing at Dylan's electric performance were exaggerated, you have to learn how to tolerate boos, when you step onto any kind of stage. You can't have a thin skin, if you seek public approval or acclaim. Bob should already have known that they'll stone you when you're playing your guitar.
[image] Dylan's green polka dot shirt
I don't think Bob wanted to be bound up in Pete Seeger's preppie straightjacket (he preferred a green polka dot shirt and a black leather jacket). To the extent that social activism and protest songs appealed to him, he wanted to do it in his own idiosyncratic way. His music was an art form, not a vehicle for a political platform or a manifesto. He didn't want to work on Maggie's farm no more.
By the same token, he wanted the freedom to be counter-cultural rather than be hamstrung by cultural conformity, dogma and somebody else's definition of ideological soundness. He asserted the right to be personal, not just political. He was one of the first to recognise that folk music had become a broken collectivity, at the same time that it tried to circumscribe personality and individuality.
Rock 'n' roll electricity didn't mean that Dylan's art and music were being diluted or re-moulded by and for populism. It was just another tool Bob used to communicate and build communal relationships. It was intended to add another personal and collective dimension.
All of the musicians who played on the last night of the festival (a Sunday) were restricted to 12 minute sets. Dylan could really only play three songs in this time. I think a lot of people had attended the festival for the sole reason that they wanted to see and hear Bob. To travel all that way just to witness three songs must have pissed them off. No wonder some of them booed, but who were they booing? Dylan or the festival management? Then there was the poor sound, which wasn't really set up for electric guitars. Bob shouldn't have taken it so personal.
[image] From right to left: Paul A. Rothchild (record producer), Richard Farina, Maria Muldaur, Mimi Farina, Thomas Pynchon (Credit: )
SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ Bob Dylan - "Like a Rolling Stone" (Studio Version)
Bob Dylan - "Maggie's Farm" (Live at Newport Folk Festival, 1965)
Bob Dylan - "Like A Rolling Stone" (Live at Newport Folk Festival, 1965)
Dylan messes up the first line of the fourth verse.
Bob Dylan - "Phantom Engineer" (later re-named "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry") (Live at Newport Folk Festival, 1965)
Some books and authors claim to be post-modernist, while others are claimed by post-modernism.
This novel (which is subCRITIQUE:
The Lives of Four Books
Some books and authors claim to be post-modernist, while others are claimed by post-modernism.
This novel (which is subject to both claims) purports to tell a life in four books. It's not clear exactly whose life it is. One of the lives is Lanark, while the other is Duncan Thaw. They might or might not be the same life. Perhaps we become different people and live different lives over the course of our lives.
Whatever the lives and to whomever they belong, the four lives aren't told in chronological order. The books are presented in the order 3, 1, 2, 4. Perhaps, Alasdair Gray was trying to tell us something about time, or our influence on ourselves?
The Arbitrary Sequence of Life
On the other hand, Gray might just have intended to reveal something about each life in an apparently arbitrary sequence:
Book 3: the life of a bohemian writer who frequents the Cafe Elite (which bears some resemblance to the venue, in Glasgow, which I was too confused or intimidated to visit while on a sojourn to Scotland in 2019);
Book 1: the life of a student at an art school;
Book 2: the life of an atheist artist commissioned to paint a mural inside a parish church; and
Book 4: the life of the political representative of a community called Greater Unthank (loosely based on Glasgow).
Together, these lives reveal something of both the protagonist and the author: no matter how unsuccessful they might have been financially, they are both polymathic and multi-talented.
Like William Blake, both Alasdair Gray and his protagonists are verbally dexterous, and observant/cognisant of architectural and visual detail.
[image] Alasdair Gray's drawing of the Elite Cafe on the cover of a manuscript
Epilogue
If the time sequence of the novel doesn't earn it the status of a post-modernist work, then its Epilogue might: Lanark meets somebody who claims to be his author:
"The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence, but I don't care."
The author explains his ambition for the time sequence of the novel:
"I want Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another."
Ultimately, 560 pages of post-modernist play (including an index of plagiarisms and influences) isn't enough to warrant five stars or any claim to be a truly classic novel. Though it does remind me of a combination of both Alexander Theroux and Terry Gilliam....more
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