What have we got here? We are presented a utopian place which is, having in mind the Eastern European but also the ironical view of the Western European who defines all other people as savages, a reference to the famous film from the 80ies – Beverly Hills Cop, then a mythological reference to Zeppelin’s song, A Stairway to Heaven, as well as an allusion of the well known though inverted Slavic country metaphor of the vigorous body of women.
Let us consider the same metaphor uncovered with slight changes:
“I’ve been stepping all day over melons and loveling watermelons. Do you remember the two melons, darling? False illumination. Two melons and leaves of grass between them from the weed of Beverly Hills. I saw today a bathing suit, with the colours of the American flag and when I least expected the flag was taken down to the waist. A complete mourning, all the carrots were buried in the sand, and I was about to receive holy communion when I was almost arrested because I proved to be a ‘big patriot’. O, America, ‘I love you’!”
Leaves of Grass is another reference to the American culture, and as far as the weed goes – we can undoubtedly see in it the difficulty of living away from the loved ones, unless it is a literary reference to another American classic. At least the context leads us to such associations. Near the end of the novel The Japanese and the Spring, however, the cited reference to the clitoris – as a key appears altered in a large degree. First of all, in a situation that was a favourite to the postmodern authors, a group of characters come across the script with the title of the novel, and one of them says: “Now, I am going to abridge her clitoris”, and somewhat later, at the next epiphany of the text “over the place where the words ‘half a meter’ were written someone added ‘as long as d-r Freud’s nose’, which, in fact, is not a reference to Freud (although the mood of suspicion that he brought about justify such an opinion), but, rather, to Flaubert. (Let us remind you how important to Flaubert was the scene with the castrated women in Egypt).
And, as Bojko Pencev writes, “the reader is driven into a discoursive Samsara, where the Other One is present only as a Trace in the yashmak of the quasireferential reality. The Japanese and the Spring is a sombre introduction of the gay science of the presence-absence, a play of the disappearances where “I” shows its incoherence with the ‘reality’. The reading, thus, becomes living through illusions, interiorisation of the unbearable, eccentricity and the ontological division of the being. The book discovers an approach towards a profundity born in suffering, a tragic gaiety, with which the character awaits the inevitable femininity of the world. Incipit vita nuova, the novel succeeds in leaping its beginning facing us with the dark drive of the will to interpret and resist.”
On the other hand, we shall remind you that the three partite Illusion by John Barthes is dedicated to the reading of love poetry. In The Dunciade (the most anecdote– like part of this work) he places the “tragic appearance of love” in the words of one of his characters. In other words: despite knowing that love is impossible, I still crave for it. This apocalyptic tone in the late 80ies – as well as in the 90ies – is typical of Bulgarian literature, and it is precisely Zlatomir Zlatanov who illustrates it in the vein of withdrawals and epiphanies. We may conclude from this that love in the postmodern Bulgarian literature appears as an allegory not of spiritual life and the liberated man (as was the case in the 60ies and 70ies), but of literature itself. So, the point of view is now changed, it is authentic – scornful.
We may say, then, that the classical devotion of the simple story to considering truth in the spirit of slimy tradition of the Great Confession that burdens us with trivial autobiographical facts displaced into a big Nothing, is evanescent. Although Bulgarian postmodern literature (with Zlatomir Zlatanov) deviates in descendent fiction and paradox – especially in terms of plot – it still manages to sharpen the plot, to deprive it from the argumentation of the obscure quasiexistentialist criticism of the 60ies and the 70ies, and hurl it into the whirlpool of a constantly selfquestioning narration. It is the intellectual-paranoiac who becomes a hero in this kind of literature, whereas the walls of its fictional world seem to be built of cardboard on which different inscriptions of the autorepresentative shadows of the main characters meet.
Therefore, I have selected for the end of this essay a somewhat longer and open discussion from another novel by the same author (The Desires of the Temple), in which we are presented perhaps a perfect postmodern text:
“Do you know me? The girl was approaching in clearer motion pictures that my look, as if secretly, seemed to cut off from the tape of a pornographic movie. She walks with ease, she breathes with ease, she has the words: Do you know me? on her T-shirt. Some philological difficulties. In the richly context of her breasts, with a clear impression of an ostensive explanation, an impudent question was written.
Oh, don’t be a fool Helen! Do you really not understand what this is all about? Here, take a good look at me. I am just a transparently cloaked quotation. The imprinted inscription on the T-shirt is a luxurious autiquotation of my luxurious body. Here, I am persistent for one last time, will you know me?
The T-shirt trembles on her, the first monarch assessed.
Her breasts tremble, the second one opposed.
Passing them, the Teacher said with pleasure:
Your dull brains tremble.
She was so close now, that the semiosphere vibrated with a more frequent resonance, after which destructive lava would have followed. Magrit would define it with the inscription: THOSE ARE NOT BREASTS. Negation of the ostensive explanation, a double illusion, in fact. Contextualised semantic enigma in images where each symbol is a symbol of another symbol. It’s only that before my eyes her breasts deconstructed in the authenticity of a privileged object. The symbolism could be destroyed by a simple stretching of the arm.
She was, however, protected better for our unexpected impact. In the early hours of the morning the photosolar glasses on her face reflected the sinful gain. ‘It makes no difference whether you know me or not. I don’t even ask you why I should be the one that in reality will be asked by the look of an accidental passer-by. That is why I made myself put on this inscription. And I would never have done it if I weren’t sure that things are not the way you imagine them. Even, you wouldn’t have been able to recognise me unless I had let you. And now, in order to save you from stupid questions, I will lay it in a defensive parody of autiquotation. Now we’re even, aren’t we?