Eight walks in the fictional woods

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Eight walks in the fictional woods

Walk no. 4
A common characteristic of the short stories of Wisdom Tooth is the taste for the bizarre, the unusual, the uncanny. Consciously and intentionally, this book chooses to stand in opposition to the normative order of things, to promote the principle of the abnormal instead of the normal, the incongruous instead of the harmonious, the bizarre instead of the sublime. Nevertheless, the purpose of this ploy is not to serve as a defense of certain negative aesthetic categories and criteria, but rather to employ reason and thus detect anomaly, absurdity, whim, kitsch, the culture of hypocrisy and other types of atypical behavior. In addition, it provokes the taste of the potential readers, shocking them into questioning the distorted values of the grim reality of our contaminated, banal environment, which deeply affects our little lives.
Thus, Bužarovska belongs to the tradition of her distant literary ancestor, Edgar Allan Poe, whose short stories “are textbook examples of the seemingly assimilated ‘bizarreness’ that still provokes reactions” (Rosik, 2002). The sense of the bizarre as an ethic and aesthetic principle serves an auto-imagological function: in the presented unusual image of otherness, we recognize ourselves and the bizarre contemporary environment.

Walk no. 5
In opposition to the bizarre, there are occasional bursts of lyricism in Bužarovska’s prose. She is able to give the ordinary and mundane a poetic and aesthetic dimension. Such lyrical passages are abundant in the short story “Waves”. To exemplify, let us quote a passage: “The city lights passed overhead through the foggy windows and slowly became milky spots between my lashes. I couldn’t really see my mother’s face because she was watching through the window without wiping the mist off of it. Then with her index finger she tried to draw an eye, but accidentally smeared the right corner. She erased it with her palm and next to it drew two mountains with a sun in between. Slowly the car got warmer, and the mountains started running down the glass. Suddenly, I was all soft and warm and fell sound asleep.”
Here, prose sounds like true poetry.

Walk no. 6
As far as possible from any utilitarian or didactic tendencies, or a type of black and white representation of reality, Bužarovska portrays a dynamic concept of reality: critical and ironic, unburdened by dogmatic perception. Irony (sometimes even the grotesque) grows into a vital philosophy, as it is the only powerful weapon of man in his grueling efforts to survive, despite all. Humor is a corrective of reality; this Rumena knows all too well, employing it tactfully within the stories. However, she also knows that “the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human” – as Henri Bergson states in his essay Laughter. “Landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,—the human caprice whose mould it has assumed” (Bergson, 1911: 9).
The humor marking the relationship between the two sisters in “Dinner Service for Guests” is particularly biting. Included within the short story are drawings – caricatures of the two protagonists, drawn by Jana Jakimovska. Not only do these portraits illustrate the content of the story, but they also evoke allusions to Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, since they visualize the true inner nature of the characters, as opposed to the masks they wear. As if on canvas, the irony is reflected in the drawings, allowing us to read within ourselves. In the end, the function of humor is luddistic, aiming to present, in the style of Bakhtin, the amusing aspects even in the deepest, most serious things.

Walk no. 7
“To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world”, Eco states in his Six walks in the fictional world, adding: “This is the consoling function or narrative – the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time” (Eco, 1993: 87). Of course, “[the narrative”] cannot say everything about this world. It hints at it and then asks the reader to do some of its work. (…) What a problem it would be if the text were to say everything a receiver is to understand – it would never end”, he concludes (Eco, 1993: 3).
Bužarovska prefers the formula of anticipating as opposed to direct descriptions. This is another strength of her open-ended narratives. Hence, her stories have double, or even multiple layers of meaning: the finale alludes to a behind-the-scenes turmoil; something puzzling is left floating in the air even after the formal ending of the story. Such are the examples of “Don’t Cry, Daddy” and “The Death of Stanka, Our Teacher”.
Man is a being destined to dialogue, communication and coexistence with the Others. Communication, however, by rule, is impaired, implying a sense of exclusion (either-or), an imbalance in dialogue or encounter. Hence, this suggests a tension in the narration which in turn opens quintessential dilemmas and ideas that linger with us long after we have finished reading the story. There are no absolute truths about the meanings of our lives; life is a trap – these seem to be the thoughts of the author.

Walk no. 8
I shall conclude these eight walks in the “fictional woods” in the manner in which I started them: with a story. This time, a story of another great master of narration – Italo Calvino. In one of his undelivered Norton lectures, Calvino speaks of the awkwardness felt when someone wishes to tell a joke, but is not good at it. He alludes to a novella by Boccaccio (VI, 1) dedicated to the art of oral narration:
“A jovial company of ladies and gentlemen, guests of a Florentine lady in her country house, go for an after-lunch outing to another pleasant place in the neighborhood. To cheer them on their way, one of the men offers to tell a story.
‘Mistress Oretta, if you please, I shall carry you a great part of the way we have to go on horseback, with one of the best stories in the world.’” The lady accepts and the master cavalier begins his story “which was indeed a very fine one”, but with “his repeating of the same word three or four or six times over, his recapitulations, his ‘I didn’t say that right,’ his erring in putting one name for another, he spoiled it dreadfully.”
“Mistress Oretta, hearing him, was many times taken with a sweat and a sinking of the heart, as if she were sick and about to die. At last, unable to endure the torment any longer and seeing that the gentleman was entangled in a maze of his own making, she said pleasantly: ‘Sir, this horse of yours has too hard a trot, and I pray you to set me on my feet again’” (Calvino, 1998).
“The novella is a horse,” – Calvino comments, and then continues: “a means of transport with its own pace, a trot or a gallop according to the distance and the ground it has to travel over; but the speed Boccaccio is talking about is a mental speed. The listed defects of the clumsy storyteller are above all offenses against rhythm, as well as being defects of style… In other words, even correctness of style is a question of quick adjustment, of agility of both thought and expression” (Calvino, 1988).
But Rumena is an deft story-teller; she has the gift for telling stories; she is the Scheherezade of Macedonian literature. She manages to catch us willing readers in her narrative web, so that when we reach the end of one story, we wish to enter another one, where there is a a story within a story within a story within a story…

References:
• Bergson, Henri. (1911/2007). Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. (authorized translation by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell). Champaign, IL: Book Jungle.
• Calvino, Italo. (1998). Six Memos for the Next Millennium. (eBook)
• Eco, Umberto. (1993). Six walks in the fictional woods. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press.
• Росиќ, Татјана (2002): Бизарни раскази, Магор, Скопје.
• Solar, Milivoj (1980): Ideja i priča, Zagreb.

2018-08-21T17:22:52+00:00 March 1st, 2011|Categories: Reviews, Literature, Blesok no. 76|0 Comments