The woman is actually kicked out of the narrativeness4F, as Jasna Koteska stresses (Ibid. 78-82). The reason for this state of expelling is in the “structural” assumption that wherever there is literary/artistic practice, there is no woman, and where there is a woman there are no conditions for a literary/artistic practice5F. Therefore the key question that is asked in Smilevski’s novel is when the narrativeness appears with Dolphy? The words that give the meaning to her life are those that define its ability for narrativeness. She has yearned all of her life to experience what her brother wishes: I want us to travel and jointly study history and poetry, not for them to make our lives more beautiful, but to live the life. She becomes and remains powerless when she understands that these are the words, the same words, that he tells any woman who is his companion at the moment, everybody who needs him at the moment (Martha, before becoming his wife, Mina, Martha’s sister, his brother Alexander). What upsets us as a readers, what excites us is her watchfulness, her modesty, and especially her self-humiliation in the name of self-defense. We get angry by her calmness and her acceptance of not being allowed to experience some celebration of life, health, beauty, wealth. She would never leave Vienna, she would not travel, she would not be a mother, she would not even be able to love, she would not be able to love those whom she wants to love her, such as her brother, her parents and especially her mother, her Rainer. Dolphy is a true example of a creature that experiences herself as a lover and animal being, and as such, she has to cherish caution from herself as a precondition for a spiritual rebirth. She is a real resentiman6F who would also transfer her stomach stench to us as readers. Very often the image that someone is sad because his heart does not have something that it desires is accepted as the only credible one. But Dolphy wishes and wants a lot. Why is than the color that she puts on the white canvas black? Maybe because the other color is the color of the dirty conscience, the black color of passion that produced the feeling of guilty conscience. She knows that the amoral is not abject. Abject is immoral. Abject is her mother who is unjustly cruel to her daughter especially when she says: When I saw in your room today the painting of the mother breastfeeding her child, I thought again that women are made to have children, and the woman who has not given birth is a monster… (127)7F or when she scolds her: You were the only one who did not fulfill her duty to marry and become a mother (103). The man who has the freedom to choose if he becomes a father or not is also abject, while his partner only has the freedom to choose how not to get pregnant from the one that she does not want to be the father of her child. The smile that hides hate is also abject. The image of the brother who tells her that she has not fulfilled her duty to the parents on behalf of brotherly love is also abject: We will travel when you fulfill at least one single duty. Everybody fulfils something to someone – their spouses, their children, the people they work with. All of your life you have existed for yourself and you complain of others, mostly them, father and mother, you complain of them even now, now the problem is that they have not supported you in what you do, as if a woman who is thirty-four needs her parents’ support. It is time you fulfill your debt to them.
You will not go anywhere this summer (108). Facing the pain of all women in the world, facing the fact that she might never be a mother, she crunches into an embrio8F in the same wardrobe in which the painting tools and canvases had been replaced with baby stuff, where the brushes, colors, spunges, frames slowly give way to baby quilts, cushins, shoes, diapers: … it was I but some other I, because what I had wanted for so many years to come was thrown out of me dead, this expectation was erased from my face and absence lied in its place, as a dark shade (121).
In the case of Adolphina Freud, we also discover the division of the body from the spirit. Although she attempts to articulate her voice, most of the time she only remains a body. In the key moments she leaves it as if it is something that disgusts her. Her soul watches the body she is placed in: Then I remembered the fist that rotted, and I thought I was watching my body, covered with fish scales, disintegrating. I only told my brother about this fear, and he convinced me that even the sick people can live long (22). Just as she hates her body, she passionately desires it at moments, because only via it she can experience herself as a subject again, rather than as a body-object, which is especially visible in the story about Reiner: … I felt the warmth of his body and the coldness with which he touched me, as if moving an object, the coldness with which this body moved as if an object moved by a different, foreign consciousness, which can only watch and direct what is body but never knows what it is to be in a body, it feels the pentration and I heard my voice, but it felt as if I was absent, as if I was not there, as if what penetrated was not part of my body and the voice was not mine, I was far away, I was in the dreamy merging of the bodies which is some return home, a return to a perfect home deserted even before the birth itself, before the conception (86-87). At moments like this, Dolphy experiences her own body as a text that is written and rewritten by anybody. She longs for the embodiment of the subject9F. It can only happen to her if she gives in to an empty body that will be able to be filled with meaning, where she can write her own text. When a body like that (just like the embryo which is forcefully taken out of her body) is totally lost, she gives in to another body like that – the artistic painting. Thus, the image that is gradually built in the course of the complete novel, from black to white, via the starting hand on the paper (30), dead language (51-54), human heart of apple peel (55-64), via the act of self-birth (90), the feet (135-139) and the shadows on the wall (169-179) gives the final self-portrait in white on white. She wants never again to be only an object in Rainer’s life, in the life of her unhappy, miserable mother, an object that should confirm the existence of the subject Sigmund Freud, confirm his identity and the meaning of the time in which both she and he lived.
Siegmund Freud’s Sister by Goce Smilevski is an excellent novel, ideally compact in its composition, its story developed in smallest details via the descriptions of the characters, their biographies, family trees, their sensible dialogues. This is a novel that allows the pain to come out of the soul, which produces the pain and looks for new souls to place it. A novel that inhales breath to pain, a breath that creates not only reality, but art as well, A novel that promotes the new sensibility, the new subjectivity10F in the contemporary Macedonian prose.
Translated by: Elizabeta Bakovska
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4. Even the most complicated narrations can be read as a variation of the model of the classical narration which is made of an expression where the initial balance is disturbed and then it is reestablished again. This term has been borrowed from Terry Eagleton, and it is related to the Freudian narration on fort-da recognition, as probably the shortest story on the object that was lost and then found. Te variant of this kind of a game, stresses Koteska, is the well known hide-and-seek game. This game is analyzed by Freud is an act of a symbolical mastering the absence of the mother.
5. Many feminists write about the metaphorical connection between the pen and penis throughout history, and that is why the equalization of the male sexuality with the literary power sounds quite justified.
6. A resentiman is a man who will not react, unlike the active man of Nietze’s philosophy who allows his feelings to be shown in a reaction. It is not that the resentiman does not feel the need to react. On the contrary! He will, however, cover this need, place it deep inside himself, and endlessly digest this feeling. See Koteska. „Грижа на совеста“ [Pang of Conscience]. Ibid. 104-113.
7. The mutual relation of women with the monsters is significant in the satirical literary text. The theme of the woman as a devaluated difference has remained constant in the elaborations of the western world, especially in philosophy. She is always related to the phenomena of what is not sacred, chaos, lower class, undistinguished. See Rosi Bradiotti „Мајки, чудовишта и машини“ [Mothers, Monsters and Machines] in Номадски субјекти. – Скопје: Македонска книга 2002, 2003, 108-135.
8. The embryo, that is, the image of the embryo is a real signifier of an abject in this novel, just as the insect and especially domestic insect mostly is found on the spot that is filled in by pure abject. The insect is not feared as a snake, it not hated as the cuckoo, it is not a bad omen like the raven, it is abject, it causes disgust, feeling of lower value and un-necessariness (Котеска: 137). This disgust is also caused when Dolphy asks to see her dead child which for Rainer is a small piece of bloody flesh. For him, it was always that both when it was inside Dolphy and outside her (118).
9. The classic vision of the subject of knowledge has fixated it in the series of dualist opposites: body-mind, passion-reason, nature-culture, femininity-masculinity.
10. This new subjectivity occurs as a reaction to the question: Has the Macedonian literature gotten tired (as the other European and world literatures) and the Macedonian novel first of all from the idea that the technique can achieve art? See Мојсова-Чепишевска, Весна. „Универзалноста на здивот“ [Universality of Breath] in Мал книжевен тестамент. – Скопје; Македонска реч, 2007, 197-206.