The Dedications of Jadranka Vladova
– intertextual matrices in Scarbo in My Yard and Water Sign –
The short stories of the two collections of Jadranka Vladova, Scarbo in My Yard (Skarbo vo mojot dvor, 1986) and Water Sign (Voden znak, 1990), in a small “intertextual firework” discover her exceptional background of a well-read intellectual writer. The matrices that she goes back to, cover the oldest, oral creation (legends, curses, stories, rituals), both the one that is of local color, Macedonian, and the one that is generally known, universal, from the Oriental fairy tales to the Ancient Greek myths.
However, the references to other books with Vladova also appear as her dedications to other writers, classics of the world literature, such as Kafka or Dostoyevsky. Very boldly, as a woman author, she enters a dialogue with some capital works of her big predecessors – men. Reworking their texts, she inserts in them a typical warmth and compassion, an almost confessional revealing of her disagreements and sorrows over things that are given, the things that she, as a romantic wants to change. Her most interesting “dedications” are definitely the following:
1. To Aloysius Bertrand
At the back cover of the first collection of short stories of Jadranka Vladova, Scarbo in My Yard, there are two sentences with scarce biographical notes on the author, together with a portrait of hers, drawn in a child’s hand. Next to them, in third person singular, there is the statement: “Forever, she loves Aloysius Bertrand”. These words that show the intimate reader’s feelings of one writer to another, in a very shrewd way set the intertextual trail that should be followed to come to the sources that the stories of this collection are built on. Bertrand (Aloysius Bertrand, 1807-1840), as a stimulus, an impulse that encompasses the work of Vladova as a whole, indicates a more comprehensive, more essential relationship, a connection that is intimate, almost a love affair, much closer than one author simply looking up to another.
In a confessional speech, in first person singular, in the first story of the collection, the author describes her irrational fear of the unknown dimension that the darkness of the night gives to her yard. In this otherwise familiar chronotope, she, in a very Bertrand-like way, places the inexplicable, and yet so usual human uneasiness before the unknown. “In midnight, at the dark hour, when rages and demons rule, I felt I heard the Devil again, gulping on the oil of my light.” says Bertrand. Continuing his thought, Vladova describes the estranging of the familiar that is brought by the night: “And – the familiar yard where the most beautiful colors of flowers and grass shine every day scares me now… something scary smells from this darkness that viciously makes my yard strange…”
The fear brings spiritual impoverishment – it erases all other thoughts from the author, and she turns towards the things she knows – Bertrand, Aloysius, the close one, the loved one, and towards his character, Scarbo, the fairy dwarf. She finds her salvation in him, and it is with him that she returns from the realm of fear to the well-known landscape of reason. “I think of Scarbo, of Aloysius who knows how to use the real words for the nocturnal darkness, fear, the ticklish expectation of miracles… I think of Scarbo until it hurts: wanting to create him I create tears under my eyelashes…” In this transfer of Bertrand’s character, in the dwarf that swings on the branches of the Big Tree in the yard, Scarbo is no longer the demonic character of Bertrand, evilly giggling, unwanted and hideous. He has lost the ability to scare – here, he is but a known face that brings peace and erases the fear of the night. Borrowing Scarbo in this way, Vladova here, by the means of intertextual exclusion erases from him certain features of the pretext – the scary becomes close, the strange becomes known.
Bertrand is found again in the second collection of short stories of Jadranka Vladova, Water Sign. His presence is quite different than the one in Scarbo in My Yard. Here, he is not a name mentioned in the stories, nor a transferred literary character, but he is intertwined in the structure that the whole collection is built upon. The black pages that sew the stories of this collection together contain the thoughts of the author, Vladova, in a loose form of a diary. At the very first black page of this stuck “diary”, she introduces us to her collection by answering a question asked outside the borders of the visible text. “My noble friend, my most secret collocutor, you ask me how far my book is… The old poems, bad conscience, night fears, visions, the comfort of words, love, the fragility of dream, the mistrust of awakening, the daily pain, smiles, hidden tears, the comfort of words… For whom?… The only reader… Maybe Aloysius…” Starting from the seemingly eternal question that the authors are asked – how far is the book, how is the writing going, Vladova comes to another question here – for whom? For whom does the writer write, to whom does he reveal his fears and pains? The answer to this question for her is a bit unusual dedication to Bertrand, presented as a dedication of the unknown diary writer, thus distanced from the author herself. In this way, not only are the stories dedicated to him, Bertrand, but Vladova also imitates the way in which he shaped his collection of prose ballads, Gaspard of the Night. Gaspard, the mysterious stranger, gives his manuscripts to Bertrand, admitting that he had been searching for the “absolute art” for a long time, sacrificing his youth, wealth, his whole life for it. Bertrand, the first reader of the writings of his character, publishes the manuscripts in his behalf. Falsely estranging his work, just like him, Vladova continues the line – Bertrand reads Gaspard, and she reads the unknown. The circle is finally closed with appealing of the unknown (skeptical) author of Vladova’s diary to Bertrand, as the critic that should value the work.
2. To Franz Kafka
The intertextual references with Vladova are not limited to Bertrand only. In the first story of Water Sign, she goes back to yet another big master of the fantastic – Franz Kafka. The story, where she refers to the well-known story of Kafka, Metamorphosis, is entitled Same (Isto). The shrewd Macedonian translation of the Latin ibid from the very beginning sets the “false” association of a scientific work, directing us to look at the previous footnote – while this footnote, the work, or the author her story, her citation, refers to, is revealed as late as the end of her story itself, in a single scream of the writer – Fraaanz. The address by first name, just like the one of Bertrand, discovers the closeness to Kafka, closeness identical to the one with Bertrand. Kafka, the intimate friend of Vladova, is so close to her that she could entrust him with the painful truth she has faced – that her father has turned into a turtle.
The unwanted, unavoidable and illogical metamorphosis, horrible as the one of Gregor Samsa with Kafka, unlike him does not happen in front of us, but in the head of the writer-narrator. The transformation of the father is not the brutally cruel awakening of a traveling salesman with the knowledge that he had turned into a big bug. The metamorphosis of the father with Vladova is more symbolic, because the turtle that he turns into exists separately from him, as his alter-ego, his subconsciousness. The turtle is actually a metamorphosis of the healthy mind into a sick irrationality, because the father has lived in his own world for a long time, one which is quite separate from the real one. But the parallel with Gregor Samsa is understandable – the mother with Vladova has the same resignation and repulsiveness as Gregor’s family with Kafka. Seeing the turtle in the yard, in this surreal chronotope of opposite things, the mother first tries to explain its existence in a rational way, and then she freely and emotionlessly throws it into the garbage. The turtle that helplessly squirms in the garbage, making efforts just like Gregor the bug to come back to its feet is still the same sad image of loneliness of the man who is alienated and rejected by his closest of kin. The essential difference between Vladova’s story and the story of Kafka is in the issue of the treatment of the author of his own work and his characters, or, even, in the treatment of the woman author for her work and her characters as opposed to the one of the man author. While the complete family of Gregor experiences his death with a relief, the narrator at Vladova, the daughter grieves for her father. In an almost Bakhtin-like dialogue (or dispute), the voice of the woman narrator, the woman writer opposes the cold, distant and alienated voice of the man writer. This dialogue is a dialogue between two different views of the world. The approach of Kafka, in its dryness and coldness condemns and stigmatizes the alienation between the people and the absence of the basic love towards one’s kin. However, it does not show or indicate a way out of this one-way road to complete human alienation. The woman, on the other hand, Vladova, gives this alienation a completely different direction. In her dreams, her narrator sees the complete sad transformation of her father after his death, and in her dreams she tries to help him: “The night after the burial I dreamt of a huge turtle on the trail in our yard. Turned on its back… It showed its bent head. Just like a snake’s head. Disgusting. But it looked at me with the eyes of the familiar sorrow asking for help. I was sweating turning it over. I worked as if I was moving a paralyzed man. But after I had turned it, pink, like a movable bush it disappeared in the garden. I was woken up by my own weeping.”
3. To Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The relation of Vladova with Dostoyevsky is stylistically placed a bit differently than the one with Bertrand and Kafka. Present in another short story, it is maybe the boldest (or most obvious) allusion, given in its title Prince Myshkin from Bitpazar (Knezot Miškin od Bitpazar). Obvious and open, the allusion does not end here, but it continues to unfold at several levels in the story. The relation with Dostoyevsky’s Idiot that is established in the title as a borrowing of the name of the main character of this novel, in the story itself also functions as filiation, because Vladova’s character moves in the frames of a typological analogy; it is related to the original Prince Myshkin in an almost genetic way.
The narrator with Vladova meets her local Prince Myshkin at the library, at the place where the readers are the closest to the written word. Surreal in his a bit grotesque physical deformity, he himself reminds of a character from the pages of some book, suddenly coming to life or, as the writer herself says: “… he looks like an unjustly hurt angel, accused of an uncommitted crime.” The distortion of the transfer of Prince Myshkin of Dostoyevsky is obvious – the visible flaw marks him immediately and obviously in a physical way, while with Dostoyevsky the flaw, the illness of his character is a combination of the physical and psychological weakness (epilepsy).
The simple-mindedness and naïve honesty with which Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin keeps on talking about his illness, mentioning himself that he is often considered an idiot because of it, is quite authentically transmitted to Vladova’s character, in the way he explains his limping. “You know… I was born like this. This is how I learned to walk. This is my natural state. Of course I get tired. But, I think, just like anybody else. I know. It looks so… unpleasant, unsymmetrical, doesn’t it?” This almost stylistic imitation of Dostoyevsky also appears in the usage of the story within the story, via the book that implies the main character – while Vladova goes back to Dostoyevsky, he himself goes back to Cervantes. Thus, under the text of Prince Myshkin from Bitpazar, one can, in a palimpsest-like way, read not only Prince Myshkin of Dostoyevsky, but also the sad face of the windmill fighter, the lonely knight, Don Quixote.
Following in a way the pattern of relations that Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin enters with other characters, Vladova develops a whole conflict between her narrator and the character about the title of Dostoyevsky’s work, or better said, around the understanding of the term “idiot”. This word, with which Dostoyevsky puts his character in conflict with the surrounding that looks idiotism in his goodness and simple-mindedness, is finally explained with Vladova with the act of reading of the original book, an act that resolves her conflict. By reading, by this symbolical moment of understanding, her Prince Myshkin finally fully sees his matrix-character, thus also knowing himself.
4. To Herself
All loves and inspirations of Vladova are put on one place in her story Overpopulated Room (Prenaselena soba), in the limited chronotope of her room. As a background decorous, the night reappears again, with all the heroes and all the pages of the books she likes miraculously coming to life. The events of the books, as she herself says, move into her room, “full with people”, and it becomes a fantastic crowd of characters, a true small intertextual fireworks. “The riders just returning from the battlefields”, “Piero dragging the giggling Columbine”, “Siljan the Stork… as if understating the children’s games nodding his head”, “Itar Pejo waving his hand” and again, “the teary eyes hazily, but surely… see Scarbo”. In the middle of this diversity of characters and books read, Vladova intimately, in a confessional way, “awake till dawn with a torn heart” says that the reader should never read alone. He is only safe in the middle of a crowd of other people, because only there “no matter how much he is in the book, with the edge of his eye he follows the others not to show them his oversensitivity.”
Here, in the room overpopulated with numberless literary worlds, he also appears. The one she loves fills in her world so that, with one book only, as she says “an unusually wise book about life” to lead to the end of her love. In the almost physical pain of the deserted and lonely woman, chased from her lover’s bed, the characters of the books return again, as torturers – “dirty uncombed dwarfs”, “ugly witches” and “overgrown old men”. The imaginary, and still so real world of a dedicated reader grows ugly and becomes awful as the love towards him changes. Quite openly, in an almost auto-referential way, the author here re-reads herself and shows the relativity of the world we create around ourselves.
No matter how much the writer is with the other people, no matter how much he reads his predecessors and debates with the world and the others in it – with the unavoidably solitary act of creation, he always, eventually, remains alone with himself.
Translated by the author