Serious Clowning

The Guardian published an obit, Dubravka Ugrešić: a droll genius with an unwavering devotion to literature, whose headline intrigued me enough for me to stick in my nose. I think I learned something, so I am passing it along:

Ugrešić was born in 1949 in Kutina in the former Yugoslavia, to a Bulgarian mother and Croatian father, but spent the majority of her working life in exile in Amsterdam. When war took hold of Yugoslavia in the early 90s, Ugrešić spoke out against the creeping nationalism of newly independent Croatia – for which she was shunned by the literary establishment (“whatever that word means,” I can hear her mutter). Booksellers stopped displaying her books and critics boycotted her works. The media even accused her of being a witch. Well versed in the intimate link between the history of sexism and tired literary tropes, Ugrešić would later respond to this charge with characteristic class: “I accepted it as an honourable name,” she told an interviewer in 1999. “I decided to take my broom and fly away.”

The literary cliques that would go on to denounce her had once swooned over her debut novel, Fording the Stream of Consciousness, a work rich in parody and slanted literary references for which she won the NIN in 1988, a prestigious Yugoslav (now Serbian) literary award whose past winners include Danilo Kiš and Milorad Pavić. Ugrešić was the first woman to receive the award and it was the first in a long line of prestigious accolades, most notably the Neustadt prize, a kind of unofficial Nobel, in 2016.

Okay, another Eastern European writer lauded over there and unknown here. So what? Matthew Janney continues with:

My first encounter with Ugrešić’s writing was her probing essay collection Thank You for Not Reading, which brilliantly dissects the widely accepted absurdities of the literary “marketplace”. The collection is unsparing, often irate, and contains some of the best examples of Ugrešić’s affectionate humour. “Recently I have done nothing but write book proposals,” she writes in one satirical essay on this sort of commercial legwork. “I took the trouble to write a book proposal for Remembrance of Things Past. It was turned down. Boring, too long, change the title…” And alongside the piercing wit, her unwavering commitment to preserve literature – and all its moral, spiritual and enchanting properties – reverberates from page to page.

In the days after her death, I revisited her book Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, an ingenious blend of narrative and folklore, and was struck by a particular passage: “Baba Yaga,” she writes, “hers is the drama of old age, hers the story of excommunication, forced expulsion, invisibility, brutal marginalisation. On this point, our own fear acts like acid, which dissolves actual human drama into grotesque clownishness. Clownishness, it is true, does not necessarily have a negative overtone: on the contrary, in principle it affirms human vitality and the momentary victory over death!”

I paused over this word “clownishness”; how many writers today would lay that allusion at their own feet? Part of Ugrešić’s greatness was her brave refusal to bend to the literary tastemakers; she hovered, gleefully, above it all.

 Oh, yes, a lesson to be learned in how to be a writer. And one who praises clownishness should not be ignored. 

I am going to taper off my writing for this blog, so I can do more reading - and my  own writing.

sch 4/22