Communicative Status of the “Cobweb Novel”

b. The Idea of the Subject: Conversation with the Reader

At the very beginning of the novel Conversation with Spinoza we encounter the following suggestion of the author: “The threads of this novel are woven from the conversation between You and Spinoza. Therefore, whenever you find a blank in Spinoza’s speech, pronounce your name and write it in the blank” (p. 8).
This comment will undoubtedly determine the built of the narrative procedure itself that follows the comment: the procedure of “dialogical novel”. Conversation with Spinoza is also, as a whole, dialogically set, split into three completely separated wholes. First: Conversation with Spinoza (cobweb novel); second: Conversation with Spinoza (circus show with five acrobatic performances); and third: Why Spinoza (instead of an ending) – which is really an auto-poetic text – a rare occasion in our literature.

The narrator– focalizer in this novel is the character of the philosopher Spinoza (has the role of a fictional hero whose basis is his real biography), the man excommunicated by the Jewish community; the implicit author and what is here indirectly given to him as a function and position to the reader. So, this is a novel-conversation between the reader and a character.
Smilevski actually applies the cortasarian (Hugo Cortasar) strategy that says that the “reader is the only thing that interest him and therefore he should create a text that will not limit the reader but transform him into an obligatory accomplice”… Thus, horizons interchange in Conversation with Spinoza shaping and changing incessantly: the one of the character of Spinoza and the one of the “real reader”. In the communicological status of the text, this is a YOU-relation of narrating that implies “contact”, that is, collaboration. In this way, the conversation with the text usually implies transformation of views and therefore it expands. This novel is, par exellance an open text because of this degree of innovation that it brings to itself, because the collocutor (reader) is not the same: with various readers who should be written down in the blanks, he has various suggestions. As a mater of fact, that is also why the context of reading and critical evaluation is “dialogical”. To interpret the book means to tell the story about the reading.
On the other hand, this conversation, this debate, as it is stated, in an authentic way concerns “both eternal and endless things and the temporary and limited ones”.
The character of Spinoza in the novel, unlike the specific reader, is primarily directed towards his internal side, towards the intimate “reality” of his identity and towards all that strives to be “I”, everything that is qualified as “I” in the world, everything that becomes a subject:
“Who I, what I? Where from and where to I? Why I? But first of all: who I? This I who rubs his sweating hands from his pockets this morning; this I who steps on the road leading outside The Hague and continues somewhere in the flatland, where the blue of the dawn falls after the snow that has covered the fields; is I Spinoza the I who looks at the shapes made by the birds on the gray skies; who I, is it this I who walks on the bends made by some cart in the snow…
How to find the I while I remember the morning when my mother explained me how to breathe in and now to breathe out, and I wonder: was it exactly I? (p. 153)
Obviously, the subject here is not completed but it is chopped up, divided, multilayered (and of course, also dramatized in the second part). He is also de-faced, crossed, parallel, examining:
“Which I to chose of all I-s scattered in time and space, or should one turn his head away from all the scattering and chopping and move in the opposite direction, to look for an only I that maybe exists in spite of all divided I-s, somewhere not on the side opposite to wind, but where there is not even a side opposite to wind, where there is no wind and space?
Or, still, I is in all of those I-s, in all passed I-s, I is in that kid that for the first time hears from his mother what breathing in and out is, I is in the words of the mother, and I is in the breathing in and out; I is in my cheeks, but also in Clara Maria’s fingers on those cheeks, and in her words: “Feel how cold they are”; I is in the one who had to leave his home and walked in Amsterdam, I is in the one who cleaned the graves overgrown in weed.
How to reach that moment when all those I-s will be joined, how to be in that moment of uniting, and then I know, although that moment feels so unreachable, I know that then I will be in what I have always wanted to be, then I will touch part of eternity and endlessness, maybe because, by experiencing all passed and irrevocable things at once, I will be more aware then I have ever been about the sticky pain of the temporariness and finality” (p. 154)
This is, most explicitly given, the “comparative identity” of the philosopher and man Spinoza, the identity made of his philosophy and his life story, identity realized from antitheism, according to the concept of the multiplied, dialogic subject of the novel.
This novel still, although initially and seemingly is “historical”, is actually based on the clash of “serious” philosophical postulates, processed and combined with the shrewd author’s “game” – the author Goce Smilevski himself testifies about its inspiration and conception in his auto-poetic prologue. Here Smilevski mentions the sources he used when shaping the character of Spinoza. These are: “Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza” and “Spinoza: Practical Philosophy” by Jules Delez, as well as “Anatomy of Melancholy” by Robert Burton, indirectly reviewed via “Black Sun – Depression and Melancholy” by Julija Kristeva.
Therefore, regardless of the part of novel’s chronotope that allows that it is treated as “historical-philosophical”, this is a complex and multisided dialogical entrepreneurship in its genre, based on the dialogization of the history and its opening towards and for the present. This “historical meta-fiction” is typical in its dialogical aspiration to rewrite the past in a new context, both the historiographical and literary and artistic past. This is confirmed by the author himself in one of his interviews: “I started from the belief that the man who wrote Ethics did not live by the rules given in it. Looked from this aspect, Spinoza was open for “shaping” for me with the “blanks” in his biography on one hand, and on the other, with his philosophy which could be opposed by a completely different life… This division in his nature, this possible fight between what the person is and his ideal, was the real challenge for a conversation with Spinoza… According to this, both philosophy and life story were motivating enough to write this novel… I believed that there was something on the other side of the factography. Because Conversation with Spinoza is built on the questionability and openness towards the universal dimensions of loneliness and death, it is a novel that could communicate both with the eighteenth and the beginning of the twenty-first century” (Utrinski Vesnik 15-16 March 2003, p. 27).
Precisely because of this, this is a confirmation that the meta-prose writer1F is very much aware of the basic dilemma: if he undertakes to “present” the world, he very quickly understands that the world, as it is, can not be presented. Therefore, this novel of Smilevski is an exceptional proof that in the literary prose, basically it is only possible to “present” the discourses of that world.
Meta-novels (Conversation with Spinoza being one of them) try to maintain the construction base don the principle of basic and assumed opposition: the construction of a fiction illusion (in this case, “cobweb novel” and “circus show with five acrobat performances”) and the unveiling of the illusion (auto-poetic prologue “Why Spinoza”). In other words, the smallest common denominator of the meta-prose is to create prose (cobweb novel) at the same time with creating an expression of the creation of the prose (“Why Spinoza”).
“Reality” in this sense is “fictional” and it can be understood through an appropriate reading process.
Therefore, because of everything stated above, this novel Conversation with Spinoza by Goce Smilevski is something different, and it is a novel that seemingly separates from the Macedonian literary milieu. Still, we think that in its own way, it follows the development line of the Macedonian literature that strives to make an inter-discursive connection between literature and historiography (Slavko Janevski, Slobodan Mickovik, Danilo Kocevski, Venko Andonovski, Dragi Mihajlovski…). Of course, it does this in its own, original way, being distinguished and recognizable, and it is supported by its enormous qualities and high artistic achievements.