A Dialogue with Our Predecessors

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A Dialogue with Our Predecessors

The previous examples somehow prove the thesis of Elaine Showalter, who says that: “… women, despite widespread myths of Amazon utopias, have never lived in a different country from men, and could never grow up as literate and educated beings without having read men’s writing.”. The works of the male predecessors are the ones to which women writers most often pay their respect and the ones that they re-read. However, a strong movement in the American feminist thought plunges into a search of the (few) literary mothers with an exploring passion, looking for women predecessors, the foremothers of the women writing not only in what is considered “official literature”, but also in the area of what is considered “private writing”, such as the correspondence and diaries. It is in the spirit of this movement that Olivera Kjorveziroska writes her novel “The Locked Body of Lou”. Via a postmodern collage of (false and true) citations, (false and true) historical and documentary records, photographs and (writer’s reconstructions of) parts of diary records and correspondence of her main character, Olivera Kjorveziroska dedicates her novel to one of her literary and intellectual women predecessors, Lou Andreas-Salomé.
Placed opposite the well known men of her time that she had contacted, such as Nietzche, Freud, Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salomé in this novel goes beyond her, due to gender historically imposed supporting role and becomes the main character not only of her own life, but also of the philosophical and literary tractates and thoughts that intertwine in the novel with the facts of her life. It is in these theoretical discussions that somehow match the way of life Lu Salome has chosen that the essential feminist definitions of women’s writing as opposed to men’s writing intersect. In her famous essay The Laugh of the Medusa (1975), the French theorist Hélène Sixous calls upon women to write locating the women’s writing in the corporal, biological sphere: “Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it… I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man.” However, it is this, the womanly, the corporal, that Lou Salomé pushes down and denies to be able to (revengfully) dominate, both over herself and over the world of men: “Directing the corporal juices of her collocutors to her mind, Lou actually takes revenge over all men’s bodies…” And yet, in this world, although Lou writes under a male pseudonim, since “for her, it was most impornant not to be a woman”, her wiritng is considered poor, and Nietzche, who “maybe her a little problem” with the lack of wiriting talent with Lou, tells her that her tractate has no rhythm. Quite in line with Hélène Sixous’s call to women to be themselves when they write, Olivera Kjorveziroska says that her heroine “as much as she is average in her literary works, is incredibly good and talented in her private correspondence”. Therefore the conclusion that I can draw about this novel: the alienation of the woman author from the “feminine” in her (with the body as its centre and source), in order to win a recognized place in the system of her predecessors will not unquestionably lead to creativity. On the contrary, the creativity of the woman author is truly manifested only when she remains true to the genuine nature of her writing urge.
The last work that I want to mention here again tackles the creativity of our women predecessors, especially what Gilbert and Gubar called “anxiety of creativity” with the women authors. The novel “Rosica’s Dolls” by Olivera Nikolova, unlike all the above mentioned works, looks for (and to some extent finds) our foremothers in our own, Macedonian history. It is in the “dark ages” that “do not fit the western movements” that Olivera Nikolova finds Rosica, our ancestral woman story teller. As the life of Lou Andreas-Salomé intertwines with the lives of the “great men” of 19th century Europe, Rosica’s life is touched and changed by the lives of the “great men’ of Macedonian history – Goce Delčev, Kuzman Šapkarev, Marko Cepenko, Grigor Prličev. Telling the stories of the tempestuous times of divisions, conspiracies, separations and misunderstandings, of Macedonia, the Macedonians, but also in Macedonia and by the Macedonians, Olivera Nikolova symbolically shows the real role that the woman had, i.e. did not have there, and decides that Rosica, our woman predecessor, chronicler, story teller, should be – mute. However, her voicelessness does not prevent her from being a chronicler of her times, be creative in a different way, by making dolls according to the faces of the people that she meets. Her muteness (inability to speak) and the dolls place Rosica in what Lacan calls “pre-oedipal phase” – when the language does not exist, the subject does not have the awareness of him/herself, and he/she is still in the early childhood. Thus, Rosica, although a mature woman of thirty-seven at the end of the novel, naively, as a child, makes a mistake in the choice of the man that she loves; unconsciously, our of intimate love (or a need to love) she betrays Goce Delčev, thus betraying her own national ideals.
When Rosica dies at the end of the novel, her unborn child dies with her, and her dolls remain scattered everywhere, faces without their stories, rags that would disappear as the time nibbles on them. That is why Rosica is not only a symbol of our forgotten Macedonian woman story teller. She also has a broader dimension: the one of the Macedonian self-forgetfulness, as defined by Misirkov, who says that the Macedonians push down their own cultural memories for the expense of the foreign traditions and models. Elaine Showalter says: “… women, like men, are shaped by the country they inhabit, by their nation’s language, history, literary cannons, cultural mythologies, ideologies, and ideals.” To be more creative, better, more ourselves, we have to constantly remember who we were and who those before us were. Or, as T.S. Eliot would say: “Tradition… can not be inherited, and if you want it, you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense,… and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”

2018-08-21T17:23:00+00:00 December 29th, 2008|Categories: Essays, Literature, Blesok no. 63|0 Comments