[The
above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside
thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant. I
welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this
video.]
From Mishima’s “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” to Kafka to “Winesburg, Ohio,” the themes of alienation and exile have pervaded world literature in the twentieth century so much as to almost become a cliché. The various political disintegrations in Europe of the 1980s and 1990s gave need to another wave of this type of literature, and is whence Dubravka Ugresic’s wonderful novel “The Ministry of Pain” comes. Reading it, I was reminded a lot of Kundera’s novels from the same time period, though Ugresic takes herself less seriously and is a much more successful ironist. While renovating an apartment she is taking in, the main character pops in a random video, and it just happens to be the film version of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
The novel follows Tanja Lucic after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia from Zagreb to Amsterdam to take up a position teaching language, mostly to students who (like her) have left Yugoslavia and are now living in Amsterdam waiting for their papers. Living near the red light district, the name of the novel derives from the store where many of Tanja’s students make ends meet constructing sex toys and other leather goods for sex-play. With a highly unorthodox approach to teaching, Tanja chooses to probe her students’ “Yugonostalgia” – memories of family, language, belonging, friends, and anything else that struck them as important about a place that, technically speaking, no longer exists. Tanja figures that her students’ experiences can provide an anodyne for the traumatic displacements their lives have been forced to take on. When an anonymous student reports her for not being academically rigorous enough, she is forced to engage in another teaching style (exiled from her old one?), leaving both her students and herself completely bewildered. But her teaching is really only one of the many parallel stories and musings that go on, taking the novel away from traditional, linear storytelling. Much of the novel takes place through interior monologue where she delivers poignant, sad, and sometimes witty remarks about the brokenness of language, modern culture, her thoughts about her students’ writing, and even one of their suicides.
Unlike in times past when the enlightened citizen-philosopher was offered in literature as the non plus ultra in relation to the modern state, Ugresic suggests that it is the exile whose fragmentation, psychic and geographic, provides new ground for understanding the self through literature. As she puts it in “Thank You for Not Reading,” “The exile, like it or not, tests the basic concepts around which everyone's life revolves: concepts of home, homeland, family, love, friendship, profession, personal biography. Having completed the long and arduous journey of battling with the bureaucracy of the country where he has ended up, having finally acquired papers, the exile forgets the secret knowledge he has acquired on his journey, in the name of life which must go on.” After all, exile is just another form of homecoming.
The novel follows Tanja Lucic after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia from Zagreb to Amsterdam to take up a position teaching language, mostly to students who (like her) have left Yugoslavia and are now living in Amsterdam waiting for their papers. Living near the red light district, the name of the novel derives from the store where many of Tanja’s students make ends meet constructing sex toys and other leather goods for sex-play. With a highly unorthodox approach to teaching, Tanja chooses to probe her students’ “Yugonostalgia” – memories of family, language, belonging, friends, and anything else that struck them as important about a place that, technically speaking, no longer exists. Tanja figures that her students’ experiences can provide an anodyne for the traumatic displacements their lives have been forced to take on. When an anonymous student reports her for not being academically rigorous enough, she is forced to engage in another teaching style (exiled from her old one?), leaving both her students and herself completely bewildered. But her teaching is really only one of the many parallel stories and musings that go on, taking the novel away from traditional, linear storytelling. Much of the novel takes place through interior monologue where she delivers poignant, sad, and sometimes witty remarks about the brokenness of language, modern culture, her thoughts about her students’ writing, and even one of their suicides.
Unlike in times past when the enlightened citizen-philosopher was offered in literature as the non plus ultra in relation to the modern state, Ugresic suggests that it is the exile whose fragmentation, psychic and geographic, provides new ground for understanding the self through literature. As she puts it in “Thank You for Not Reading,” “The exile, like it or not, tests the basic concepts around which everyone's life revolves: concepts of home, homeland, family, love, friendship, profession, personal biography. Having completed the long and arduous journey of battling with the bureaucracy of the country where he has ended up, having finally acquired papers, the exile forgets the secret knowledge he has acquired on his journey, in the name of life which must go on.” After all, exile is just another form of homecoming.
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