Karin Kukkonen
Literature makes you feel and it can get you thinking too. But how do you move from signs on the page to thoughts and feelings? And why does fiction sometimes feel more real than the world around us? My name is Karin Kukkonen, and together with my colleagues from the Literature, Cognition and Emotions project, LCE for short, we will discuss these and other questions in the coming weeks. Today's guest is Stijn Vervaet, Associate Professor of Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Balkan studies at the University of Oslo. And our topic is cultural memory. Thank you for joining us, Stijn.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, thank you for the invitation, and thank you for having me here.
Karin Kukkonen
You've worked on literature in relation to memory. But the kind of memory that you're interested in is not necessarily this personal or autobiographical memory, but rather the memory of a culture – or the memory of maybe a nation even. And you've written a book about memory culture in Yugoslavia – or, the former Yugoslavia. Could you tell us a little bit more about this idea of cultural memory, and why it's interesting to study this for the particular tradition of Yugoslav literature?
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so with cultural memory, scholars generally refer to the idea that collective remembering is something, that is... That has a strong symbolic dimension that's mediated, and has a performative character that is mediated, in other words, by or through the interaction of various media. This can be museums or history textbooks, but also novels and films – but also in addition to broader political and media discourses. Yes, so literature emerges here, as one of the medias of... One of the media of memory. And the big difference with approaches that stress the personal or the cognition, is that cultural memory per definition is seen as having a non-genetical or non-biological basis. So it is transmitted through – and with the help of – culture and cultural artefacts that give shape to and circulate narratives about the past, and as such contributes to giving, reviving, or giving body to the past in the present.
Karin Kukkonen
If I understand you correctly, then cultural memory is... You don't need to have experienced it in order to remember it?
Stijn Vervaet
Not necessarily... Or not at all. Yeah, so you can – I guess all of us in the room, we'll have some memories of 9/11, without having been there at the moment. So we have memories of these events through television, or maybe, perhaps by reading a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. So we do not necessarily have... Have been a participant of an event, or have experienced the event itself. As you said, yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
And for the kind of literature that you're working on, Yugoslav literature, why is it particularly interesting to look at cultural memory and literature, as you put it, as medium of cultural memory?
Stijn Vervaet
Well, in the Yugoslav context, in the 20th century – we could also elaborate on the 19th century, which was all over Europe the century of romantic nationalism and state building. But in Yugoslavia in the 20th century, the use or the abuse of the past for political purposes has had particularly notorious side, actually, especially if we look at the most recent wars of the 1990s. Okay there, when I say recent, they ended like 25 years ago. But then again, these were one of the most horrible wars on the European continent, certainly after the Second World War. But in Yugoslavia, the past was often used to establish clear-cut national identities, and sometimes – as was clearly the case in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s – also to fuel or instigate wars or even to justify violence against members of a different ethnic or religious group. And of course, since it is often the state which has a monopoly on violence, it is the state who will use or channel certain visions about the past and then use these to give shape to a specific national identity. And in the in the final decade of the 20th century, and also in the last [first] two decades of this century, these state supported visions of the past have often been geared toward the discourse of what we could call competitive victimhood. So the idea that their own nation – be it Serbian, Croatian, the Bosnian Muslim or Bosniak, or the Kosovo-Albanian – was the biggest victim of these wars. And as such... or, this position of competitive victimhood, of course, rules out the possibility of having a genuine dialogue with victims of other nations, and perhaps their vision on wars, on the one hand, but also on the responsibility of their own nation for crimes committed during these wars.
Karin Kukkonen
So the way in which you describe these competitive victims – who's been treated the worst, or who's had the worst suffering... That, of course, is something that treats an entire nation as a person. That is also, I guess, a way of telling a story as you would of a nation as you would tell the story of an individual person and their suffering?
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, exactly. So it's basically resting on, kind of, ascribing identity – a collective identity – to individuals, without leaving the choice to the individual whether they want to belong or not, or to what extent they want to identify with this nation. But the use of the past, as a search for goals of state or nation building, had of course also a precedent before the 1990s in the project of Socialist Yugoslavia, which – after the Second World War – also tried to wipe under the carpet the internecine war that was going on on the territory of Yugoslavia during the Second World War –and instead, create a kind of forced consensus that war in the Second World War was basically a battle between Yugoslav antifascists, on the one hand, and German Nazi occupiers. Yeah, so, and this whole master narrative, if you wish, put under the carpet both the notion of the Holocaust, as a kind of endeavour by Nazi Germany to eradicate European Jewry, but also it silenced, actually, interethnic conflicts that had been part and parcel of the Second World War – and that claimed even... or, that caused even more victims than the aggression from Nazi Germany.
Karin Kukkonen
So, in this picture – that is already very complicated: Where does literature come in, and what are the kinds of... How does literature deal with that situation where you've got these narrativizations and these master narratives?
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, well after having told this, perhaps, a bit black and white image of both socialist Yugoslav culture and the memory narratives of the past thirty years in this post-socialist Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian or Kosovo nation states... Of course, these master narratives are never completely homogeneous or hegemonic. So there's always a space in public discourse and – including – in culture for alternative narratives. And I think that is where literature comes in. So then, we could look at the interplay between the literature written by survivors of the Holocaust, which can be seen as kind of an intervention into this socialist master narrative. Whereas, the more recent works of post-Yugoslav literature could be seen as an intervention, to some extent, into current uses and abuses of the past.
Karin Kukkonen
So they're telling stories that might, on the one hand – I think you used the word – interfere with the master narrative, but perhaps also construct alternative memories?
Stijn Vervaet
Having said this, of course, it doesn't mean that all literary works by definition interfere or work as a counter memory. Of course, there are always authors and artists that agree with this master narrative and support it. Yeah, so it's not a black and white or very clear-cut situation, but I do believe that valuable works of literature can offer the reader a kind of... Because of this imaginative potential of literature to offer different analogies, different genealogies and different perspectives on the past, literature can function as a kind of either intervention into, or a kind of counter memory, or an alternative to self-victimising stories – or whatever you call it.
Karin Kukkonen
Your book covers a fairly long stretch of literary history, from the Second World War pretty much to the present day. So I was wondering, if you could tell us a little bit more about how the literary, let's say, construction of memory has developed in that time span?
Stijn Vervaet
Okay, yeah, so the first generation of survivors, they – maybe – per definition drew more on their own experience, right? So, these first decades, our literary production that could be described as autobiographically based to a high extent – which doesn't mean that these were documentary writings... So, most of those people, whether they wrote novels, or drama, or poetry, they combined, so to say, a kind of autobiographical experience with modes of fictional storytelling. For example, the use of metaphors – in one of the first novels ever published in 1951 by a Holocaust survivor – is really incredible, and really distinguishes it from a mere documentary description of his experience. So, József Debreczeni – the author, to whose work I'm referring now – uses, I think, metaphors as a way both to draw the reader into the text, and to give the reader a kind of feel of what it was to be in this forced labour camp in Silesia, or even some days in Auschwitz as well. But at the same time, these metaphors are of such a nature that they push the reader back, in terms of making a complete identification with the narrator of the story impossible. So the idea that, okay, this is a testimonial text – the meaning of the text is to witness to the suffering of people, including that of the narrator and author – but, please don't think as a reader that, okay, after or when reading this, then you know it. No – you will never know what the experience will be, and this push-and-pull of these metaphors plays an important function in this – yeah, also already in these very first survivor accounts, if you wish. Whereas, later in the second generation you have, of course, completely different dynamics, because as the term second generation – which has been more or less accepted, I think, in Holocaust studies – implies, these are children, usually of Holocaust survivors, who grew up with the weight of this experience of their parents. But very often – yeah, this could be realised in very different ways – either their parents would be talking about very often about their experience, or these children would be familiarised by photographs or family stories. You will maybe recall – as a comic scholar – Maus, yeah. Or, parents could choose for the completely opposite strategy, not to talk at all and to silence completely. But very often this would have a similar effect on their children, in terms of triggering their curiosity about their parents' pasts and going to the archives and delving into historical materials, correspondences, and so on, in order to then reconstruct the story of their parents. And this very reconstruction of their parents' history, of course, is something that also an author of a fictional narrative does to some extent. Does that answer your question?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, so this is, I guess, in both cases – both the authors who experienced it and who write about it, but in such a way that you can't say "Oh, I know this", and the children of Holocaust survivors who try to reconstruct it... Both of these seem to be places where personal memory slides into cultural memory, and the other way around, so that it actually gets quite difficult to draw the line, I don't know.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, I think it is. Well, some scholars of collective memory... Some of the earliest scholars, like Maurice Halbwachs, a French sociologist, he was convinced that personal memory as such does not exist. And of course, this was in a move against Henri Bergson and his ideas of very subjective time, and so on. But there is something to it, right, because just when you try to create a narrative, you always imply – to some extent – also a reader or a listener. So that's one thing. And on the other hand, try very hard to think of and to remember an experience where you were really alone, and nobody was around, and where you have no social frame at all?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, you are usually reacting to someone when you remember something.
Stijn Vervaet
So, it is indeed very difficult to completely disentangle, if not impossible, to disentangle personal and collective memory, I think. And also to neglect the role of culture or of narrative, if you wish, in these processes.
Karin Kukkonen
And then, how far do you think these novels, which I assume had a broad – or have a broad – readership... Do you think there's something that contributes to this Halbwachs phenomenon, that there is no such thing as personal memory, that you sort of construct your memory insofar as it is tied to your identity, to the stories that you've read, to the novels, to the literary versions of the past...?
Stijn Vervaet
Yes, and also, very much of course depends on the status of those novels, right? So, some authors I discussed in my book were completely, well, forgotten, to some extent. So we could say – if we refer to Aleida Assmann's notion of the Canon of active memory and the Archive of passive memory – that is more like dusting in the archives, even though they had a vivid reception at the time of their publication. While other novels, such as those by Danilo Kiš, David Albahari, or Daša Drndić – whose work I discuss in later parts of my book – are still widely read. And these authors do still appeal to many readers, both in the countries of former Yugoslavia and abroad, and are also available in translation.
Karin Kukkonen
So, that would then be a sort of political decision, if, I mean, the Archive and Canon distinction. If you say, something is Canonical, then you put it on... I don't know, the syllabus in school. Is there something like that going on in Yugoslavia at the moment, or in the countries that used to be Yugoslavia?
Stijn Vervaet
Yes, and also, indeed, the institutional power, in defining what will belong to the Canon and what will remain in the Archives, is very strong. To the extent that institutions, the state, can also decide to destroy an archive – right? – and just eradicate any material traces of an event. But, to answer your question about the Canon: Yes, institutions in former Yugoslav countries have, over the past 20–25 years, tried very hard to set a specific Canon, but my impression is that they usually do it through education and through history textbooks, through museums. Whereas, in the sphere of literature, authors still can publish a book, right? There is no monopoly on publication in the countries of the former Yugoslavia today. So culture still has a kind of moving space, even if education might be in a in a very bad state.
Karin Kukkonen
I guess it's easier to write a novel than to open a museum.
Stijn Vervaet
Um... Yes...?
Karin Kukkonen
I mean, just institutionally speaking, not...
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, institutionally, yes. So, it's not said that you will get a reward for the novel, or that your novel will become part of the curriculum, but yeah. And, of course, today you also have a lot of non-governmental organisations, who also play an important role in the public sphere in those places that... Yeah, so the state does not have complete monopoly over the use of the past – ad hoc.
Karin Kukkonen
There's of course also another meaning to Canon in the sense that, I mean, there is Holocaust survivor literature in other literatures as well. So it's... I don't think genre is the right word, but there is a recognisable body of literary text that deals with the experience of, say, being in a camp. And this could of course be a concentration camp, or it could be a gulag. I mean, there are very famous examples of gulag literature as well. Do you think there is – or do you think it's useful to talk about the specific Yugoslav literature, that you're working on, in relation to these other bodies of texts, dealing with that particular kind of experience? Because, I assume they were translated into Yugoslav languages as well.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, so one important case that comes to mind here is Danilo Kiš, who wrote A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. And, as he used to say it in interviews at the time, he was inspired to write this novel by the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s first volume of the Gulag Archipelago in French, and by the public debate on the French left about this book. So, the French left was... Because Kiš was then a lecturer of Serbo-Croatian in France – so living there – and he was completely upset by the French left's take on Solzhenitsyn, because they saw it as a kind of betrayal of the communist cause. Yeah, so he said then, "Well, okay, I will write a book about this". And he basically started from the idea of the... the notion of the pseudo-autobiographical document. Meaning the idea that – under Stalinism – people who fell out of grace, their biography was either adapted or erased from official... not only documents or encyclopaedias, as is the case in the book. But, a famous example is also the retouching of photographs, right? So, he started from this notion to think through, basically, or to stage a fictional narrator, who behaves as a kind of pseudo-historian, who will then reconstruct the biographies of these victims of Stalinism – who's often started as very strong supporters of communism, but then ended up in the gulag. But he then links these stories to the fate of European Jewry, so there is a kind of connexion between – in Kiš’s view – between authoritarianism or Stalinism on the one hand, and Nazism on the other hand. And he tries to bring this together. But in hindsight, we could question whether Kiš would have been… Also later, if he had survived, if he had lived long enough – because Kiš died in 1989 – if he would have been so enthusiastic about Solzhenitsyn. Because later in the 1980s and up till 2000 there was a debate about some – yeah, real or alleged – antisemitism of Solzhenitsyn. So the question is whether Kiš would still have supported Solzhenitsyn to the very end. Yeah, but this may be another discussion.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, so I guess, even within the, let's call it the literary canon, there is an archive and the canon. And there is a dynamic going on between multiple ways of… availing yourself of the genre or the topic. That would then also, of course, fit into different versions of cultural memory, into different versions of building identity.
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, well, I think the position of an author in a canon is not set in stone, and also, maybe, the whole oeuvre of an author. Or some books of an author can be part of the canon, regardless, I think, as Solzhenitsyn is still an important author, regardless of… or yeah, the same could be said of Dostoyevsky – right? – who also had antisemitic views, and it will be very difficult to think of Russian or European literature without Dostoyevsky.
Karin Kukkonen
Yes, yes. So cultural memory is something that is with us, whether we want it or not.
Stijn Vervaet
Yes.
Karin Kukkonen
So we've talked about many great authors, Dostoevsky, none the least. Do you have a recommendation for our listeners? What they could read? What would be an interesting novel?
Stijn Vervaet
Well, not all of the books that I dealt with are available in translation, but I would certainly recommend Danilo Kiš, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. And of the more recent authors, maybe Saša Ilić, The Berlin Window, which is available in French and German translation, or Daša Drndić, who died, actually, a bit more than one year ago, in the summer of 2019, and one of her books, Trieste, is also available in Norwegian translation since… yeah, recently.
Karin Kukkonen
And I think she's been translated into English quite a lot?
Stijn Vervaet
Yeah, into English as well, yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, thank you very much for taking us into the cultural memory of Yugoslav literature, for talking us through all these different dynamics, both historical and identity-memory related, and also thank you for the reading recommendations.
Stijn Vervaet
You're welcome, and thank you for having me here.
Karin Kukkonen
And thanks to everyone listening to the LCE podcast – till the next time.