Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

At another point, the narrator slips in a more general comment that reveals the novel’s approach to history at the end of some reflections on Bosnia as a “Yugoslavia in miniature”: “If a story about the great in the small could have been recast into a story about the small in the great, the history of our country would look very different, and we would seem more normal to those who will one day study it.”

This is an important point, and it adds to the comments made above regarding the focus of the novel on the common problems of common people: a superficial familiarity with the history of the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans leaves one with the impression of a region of eternal memory and almost continual bloodletting and strife that “has produced more history than it could consume locally,” as Churchill is alleged to have said. (This false impression finds one of its most extreme presentations in Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts. ) Of course, many of the characters in The Walnut Mansion are colorful, to say the least, but they are nevertheless ordinary people —people in whom most readers from anywhere ought to be able to recognize some of themselves.

The novel also makes the point, slowly, concentrically, that the edifices of an age are made small by the passing of time. Indeed, Regina’s brother Bepo, living out his days in an asylum, states the idea in a fresh, prospective way:

We believe that communism is something great and eternal. We think so because it is in proportion to us, but it won’t be for our children and our children’s children. The little ones can’t understand the big people, just as we can’t understand them. We know only that communism will seem trivial to them. They’ll take a red banner between two fingers, like this, and will walk across Russia in three steps because Russia will seem small to them too, much smaller than Pelješac. You just watch children growing big and you see that there’s no point in measuring the world on a scale bigger than your own life.

Russia is not the heart of the matter; one need only substitute “Russia” with “Yugoslavia” or some other cultural titan to bring the idea home. The children of today will walk over our edifices as if they were toys.

Inextricably linked with its telling of history through the eyes of ordinary people is the aforementioned reverse chronological order of the narrative. In recent years, reverse chronology has been a popular device in novels (e.g., Viktor Pelevin’s The Yellow Arrow ) and movies (e.g., Memento, Irreversible ). Though it is often considered a postmodern technique, Jergović maintains that he employed reverse chronology simply to “follow the logic of an individual human history, the logic of memory.” 4Indeed, at one point the narrator suggests that “every whole human story starts from the end.” This adherence to the logic of memory can explain the segues into the stories of peripheral characters that some reviewers have found distracting. 5But it is precisely these digressions into the “lateral zones” of the plot that provide a fuller picture of life and enrich the historical perspective. The so-called digressions and nested narratives are far from alien to the literature of the region but recall the digressive nature of its folk epics, as well as the narrative approach of none other than Ivo Andrić (as in, for example, The Damned Yard ). 6

Jergović’s emphasis on memory in the novel calls to mind Danilo Kiš’s short story “The Encyclopedia of the Dead.” In this story a woman dreams of a trip to Sweden, where in the Royal Library she finds the Encyclopedia of the Dead, a massive set of volumes that provides detailed chronicles of the lives of ordinary people, and reads its detailed account of her deceased father’s life. She describes the Encyclopedia as a “treasury” of memory produced by writers who “record and value every life, every affliction, every human lifetime.” These words could almost be a description of the approach to historical narrative of The Walnut Mansion. Likewise, the temporal structure of The Walnut Mansion is very reminiscent of that of the Encyclopedia, as described by the narrator: “Every period of time was rendered in a kind of poetic quintessence and metaphor, not always chronologically, but in a strange symbiosis of different times — past, present and future. How else can one explain a sad comment in that text, in that ‘picture book’ of the first five years he spent at his grandfather’s in Komogovina, which reads, if I remember correctly, ‘Those would be the best years of his life’?”

Not only does the reverse chronology of The Walnut Mansion produce such a “strange symbiosis of different times,” but it even employs the future-in-the-past quite frequently, as in the following random example taken from early on in the novel: “That evening saw the occurrence of everything that would lead to the death of Regina Delavale, or crazy Manda” (my emphasis — SMD).

Thus, Kiš’s description of the Encyclopedia of the Dead seems at the same time to be a fairly accurate outline of the narrative strategy of The Walnut Mansion. The Encyclopedia of the Dead is of course a fantasy, even within the world of Kiš’s story, but the tale of Regina Delavale reads almost like a sprawling entry in the Encyclopedia. In any case, one cannot read The Walnut Mansion and come away unconvinced that Jergović is a writer who “values every life, every affliction, every human lifetime.”

Jergović tips his hat to numerous writers of the lands of the former Yugoslavia, and Kiš is only one of them. (There are, by the way, other allusions to Kiš in the novel. For example, Jergović makes a passing play on Kiš’s story “Last Respects,” which tells of the honors bestowed upon a prostitute at her funeral. The honors are inverted in The Walnut Mansion: a group of prostitutes gathers to honor the memory of Luka, their spendthrift faux-client.)

I have already mentioned the focus on the effect of history on ordinary people common to The Walnut Mansion and Andrić’s The Woman from Sarajevo. On a more general level (and leaving aside the reverse chronology of The Walnut Mansion ), Jergović’s narrative style shares many similarities with that of Andrić. This is not surprising, as both Andrić and Jergović were raised in Bosnia, a land where oral traditions have been strong and the people take delight in storytelling. And Jergović has certainly made no efforts to distance himself from Andrić’s writing, even or especially at times when Andrić came under fire in both Croatia and Bosnia itself for his Serbian self-identification.

An important similarity is the multitude of voices in their stories. Like Andrić’s prose, The Walnut Mansion is decidedly polyphonic: a great many voices tell stories and anecdotes that contribute to the overall depiction of life in twentieth-century Yugoslavia. And as with Andrić, though there is an omniscient narrator who does not narrate in a distinct voice, that omniscient narrator does occasionally comment directly on the plot or its themes as if actually speaking with the reader. A further feature that Jergović shares with Andrić is the frequent employment of free indirect discourse, which allows the omniscient narrator to seamlessly render the characters’ thoughts.

Other writers to whom an attentive reader can find allusions are those as different as the Serb Borislav Pekić, the Croat Miroslav Krleža, and the Bosnian Meša Selimović (and there are certainly others that have escaped my attention). It thus makes no sense to try to pigeonhole Jergović as a writer who self-identifies with only one of the increasingly ethnically homogeneous enclaves that have risen out of the ashes of the former Yugoslavia. And it should be pointed out that he does not “long for [the state of] Yugoslavia; what perished had to.” 7Rather, Jergović appears to be an odd thing — a post-Yugoslav writer, in the literal sense of the term, and in a cultural sense, as opposed to a political one. It is doubtful that he would agree to be considered anything else. And his work, including The Walnut Mansion, is the richer for it.