ISIDORA SEKULIĆ AS AN EARLY SERBIAN EXPRESSIONIST
Bojana Stojanović Pantović, PhD, Full Professor
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad
[email protected]
Abstract
In the complex and sometimes controversial literary work of Isidora Sekulić
(1877-1958) there are some topics or issues which can be considered as a
set of the open and problematical areas with a transparent or implicit,
hidden links. These references are notable both in her numerous essays as
well in the narrative, romanesque or travelogue prose, especially in her
first collection Co-travellers which anticipates expressionist articulation
modes and stylistic devices of the next avant-guarde generation in the
Serbian literature.
From the point of the actual reception, symbolic title of the first
collection of short stories Co-travellers (Saputnici, 1913) by the Serbian
prominent writer Isidora Sekulić (1877-1958) as if only now, almost a
century later, outlines the contours of meaningful consent of two times,
two literary-historical epochs. The first period in which this
indispensable book was written officially belongs to the the modern era in
the Serbian literature (1901-1918) and represents its preexpressionist
phase in many aspects. The other epoch, namely our contemporary age, has
been necessarily reflected in the process of reading and interpretating the
fiction debut of Isidora Sekulić. In other words, the question of symbolic
title suggests the problem of changing the reception horizon and a new
articulation of the writer's narrative experience: whether Sekulić's Co-
travellers of that time could be just co-travellers at the turn of the
century reader, even the millenium?
This issue could be concidered at first glance rhetorical, if we
didn't take into account the importance of the appearance of the collection
in the context of modernization of the Serbian prose. It is written in the
tradition of lyrical prose that in Serbian literature came to life at the
turn of XX century, in the form of short prose genres such as prose poems,
sketches, short stories and novellas. The author's predecessors Jovan
Dučić, Petar Kocić and especially the collection of Milutin Uskoković
(Vitae fragmenta, 1908) anticipate the similar and common topoi and the
thematic anallogies: impermanence, solitude as an existential commitment,
despair, resignation, erotic conflict and alienation, longing and
nostalgia, vitalistic ecstasy and atonement, gender roles, etc.
Compared to its predecessor Uskoković, Sekulić's collection
represents a much more complex and narrative skilled written book. In her
work intellectual and analytical-essayistic digressions as well as the
play of the narrative perspectives have a higher proportion. In this sense,
this tradition will continue Ivo Andrić with his famous lyrical prose Ex
ponto (1918) and Riots (Nemiri, 1920). Sekulic's collection contains of
sixteen texts of unequal length with the metaphorical titles, whose
abstract meaning refers to a certain mental, spiritual, or philosophical
and anthropological mood, attitude or Weltanschaung. They also take on
certain characteristics of the existential categories united in a circular
path of eternal and painful changes: desire, longing, fatigue, solitude,
wandering, homesickness, November, torture, headache, separation, brake up,
irony, sadness, question, circle.
Here we must stop for a moment and return to the cover topic of our
work concerning the place of the Co-travellers in the expressionist
spiritual space not only in the Serbian literature, but also related to its
European, primarily German expressionist origins. To that extent, the first
published book of Isidora Sekulic, often unfairly underestimated since the
famous critical review written by Jovan Skerlić (Stojanović Pantović 1997:
341-349) is challenging from the point of re-evalation of its aesthetic and
semantic potential. This happens through a tacit acceptance of his post-war
assessments, and the relative indifference of those artists who have done
most for the interpretation of modern forms of Serbian literature. This
would mean that Co-travellers may represent the cornerstone of the modern
Serbian prose, and one that will be formed shortly after World War II,
especially in the writings of Miloš Crnjanski, Stanislav Vinaver, Stanislav
Krakow, Rastko Petrović, Dragiša Vasić and other authors whose prose has
obvious expressionistic marks.
In this regard, although the usual periodization of the Expressionist
movement in the Serbian literature recognizes the so-called termination,
pre-war generation of creators and practical reconstruction of the Serbian
literature, which are articulated in the modern tradition of fierce
resistance, the pre-war years, especially the 1913, can be regarded as
expressionistic style in a number of writers such as poet Vladislav
Petković Dis and especially Ivo Andric with his first book of lyrical-
meditative prose Ex Ponto and Riots (Vučković 1979: 14; Stojanović
Pantović 1998: 24-26).
With circle being a bearing symbol in the Co-travellers collection it
also corresponds to the first collection of short stories of Stanislav
Vinaver (Short stories which lost their ballance, 1913), in which can be
seen a tendency toward formation of expressionist prose text model
(Stojanović Pantović 2003: 56-78). Both with Isidora Sekulic and
Stanislav Vinaver, in one part of the text it doesn't only deal with
deformation and distortion of the narrative process, but also a radical
change of attitude on the spiritual world decentred subject: male or
female, no matter who is placed in the foundations of the expressionistic
concept of reality. In doing so, the fragmentized and dispersing prose
tissue testifies that Isidora's gift could have been developed, at least
for some time, in a direction of a different, detabooed speech and thought
of the psychological, cultural and existential determinants of women
producers and eroticised "dance of words" (A.G. Matoš) that represents a
step forward in the organization of the logocentric gender/society/world/
universe (Kristeva 1980: 23-26).
The generation mentioned that was by the proclaimed Serbian writers
of the twenties is a subject of Sekulić's latent polemical text "Riots in
the Literature" written in 1924 , when the poetical turn towards
modernised psychological realism completely prevailed in author's work.
But. this writing is important because it indirectly testifies to Sekulić's
intuitive awareness that they are the pre-war writers (among which, of
course she takes a prominent place), signaling a radical shift in the
former literary practice. Assessing the difference between pre and post-war
writers not as great as it first appears, Isidora Sekulić observes: "The
post-war, modern text, deprived of linguistic and stylistic features, comes
down to ideas, images and psychological basis which easily includes the pre-
war writers. If you return the text back to a modern form, it becomes
clear to you that the expression is still in the effort and want. New
elements are there, no doubt, but they do not yet live, do not convince do
not reign. They impose, conquer, just fight" (Sekulić 1967: 101-102). And
it's her and Stanislav Vinaver, before all in prose, provided the initial
impulse for the late radical deconstruction of normative and utilitarian
rules prescribed by critics Bogdan Popovic and Jovan Skerlić.
From the collection of sixteen pieces in the Co-travellers, seven may
prove to contain some of the important aspects of the expressionist prose
model whether it is a conceptual, thematic, narrative, stylistic or
semantic one. In some places they appear united, and then we can safely
conclude the deflection from the prevailing impressionist-symbolistic
paradigma of other nine texts in the book
What unites most of these texts on the narrative level is discussion
from the self, "Ich" position, the instance of narrative perspective,
which no longer has the status of a coherent sign of meaning in the
structure of the text, but it is split off from the inside, even several
times doubled, that we can even speak of its dispersion and fragmentation,
and certainly of poliperspectivism in the perception of oneself. The crisis
of cognitive powers of the subject so poor in a relation to the
dissolution of the traditional metaphysical world hierarchies is precisely
reflected in the analytical self-observation or introspection. This device
provides Isidora Sekulic a plunge into her cloven subjectivity always from
a different angle, but translating each subjective state, mood or self-
realization to the level which pretends to the generality of conclusions
that are of cognitive-philosophical nature.
Hence the author questions the value of the Carthesian way of
thinking, the logic and causality in the sketch "Solitude". It thematazies
two key expressionist topoi of loneliess and death. She becomes aware, in a
purely, poetical way of the relativity of each deduction, the justification
of existence of the center, which grounds our understanding of the cosmic
order and absence of absolute and established truth. And it is this
knowledge that we don't know the essence of any basic notion, and the last
principles of the being are "night and darkness for us" (Vietta &Kemper
1979: 14-43), no more rationally, but through the realize universal
situations that she has always explored in her fictional and essayistic
prose.Feelings of loneliness, those experienced in such a radical way, as a
complete withdrawal from life, as the slow disappearance of the author,
will associatively link to the focal point of death, that she, like most
expressionist doesn't see as a neo-romantic heaven but as an absolute
absence, as a form that a person does not know, because it is completely
empty on the other side of life.
In doing so, Isidora Sekulic serves the same images that are based on
the aesthetics of ugliness, in shaping the vision of the moment of death,
which includes images of decay and decomposition, thus achieving the effect
of disgust and revulsion so close to the Expressionists: "I hear nothing.
There far I only see the line, of blue, cold light, and I remember the
twinkle rotten matter that decays, and the quiet movement of slimy white
worms that are the last and simplest conclusion is terrible logic of
earthly life" (Sekulić 1995:35). And it is this knowledge of Nietzschean
"eternal return of the same," the zen aporia of tapping in one place where
it is catching up to point of birth and death that became the main point of
the thematic backbone of the two perhaps most interesting collection of
short stories in Co-travellers. It is "The Headache" (Glavobolja) and
"The Circle" (Krug) that Jovan Skerlić did not understand and hence
cynically crticized.
Let's first analyze "The Headache". It is almost a medical-
psychological verbatim of development and the start of a migraine,
provided however, in the cinematographic, simultanious style that was
promoted by the Expressionist writers (Sokel 1969: 143-169). It's
interesting, however, that this text, although written in precise,
documentary style, seemingly deprived from emotion (such as Gottfried Benn
prose, for example) with its opening image gives the reader the
psychological motivation. A headache is a symptom of self-torture, and it
stems from a terrible state of anxiety produced in us by the logic circuit.
Hence, the initial image with elongated human figures that seem to walk in
spherical mirrors is an example of distortion as a key principle of
narrative distortion, deformed model of the world, and also the base for
fantastic-grotesque shaping of a prose text.
Migraine pain in the narrator wakes the desire for answers even
bigger: why headache and what causes it, so that at one point it provokes
some kind of visual hallucinations, or precisely described apparition which
has the same status of parallel realities. And that picture of certain
geometrical figures which in Expressionism bear a codified meaning
(Stojanović Pantović 2003: 85-87) is to be found with Isidora Sekulić:.
"Around the pupil there are, arranged in a circle, bright and mischievous
sparks. Only when one arc tears off from the circle, sparks are upset
and rushed to the pupil center, but before they reach it, they draw back,
the final sparks increase the speed, making the arc straight. Then the
middle spark bursts, everything flashes, and when that effect of light is
gone, the arc is again in its regular form and in its old place in the
circle. So an arc by arc, the whole circle around the pupil. And all of
this happens in a tremendous speed, light traces of arcs and lines catch up
and converge, and before me there's a straightened circular line in one
moment, and a circle of a curved straight line in the next"(Sekulić 1995:
66-67).[1] It is as headache presents a symptom or a sign of a deeper and
more enduring pressure that self-articulates with an apparition - and it
will just be the subject of Isidora's a parabolic-essayistic sketch "The
Circle", one of the best in the Serbian literature in the twentieth
century.
It is also written from a position of Ich form, with an intense
psychological and emotional charge of narrator's voice. The introductory
part also develops into a grotesque and a very striking picture that was a
result of author's illness and high fever to be precise. Scary pictures of
people disappearing in the guts of the ball, which has no edges or walls,
in the other words iside the circle on which all paths are equal and all
distances to the center are of the same length. And outside the ball, says
the narrator, is a space of freedom with "unreachable, outlaws routes and
escapees-points" which are, in fact, "unleashed points of the late former
spheres." (Sekulić 1995: 78). That makes "The Circle" a typical
expressionist revolt against the tyranny of the center, which includes the
principles of order, harmony, proportion of parts subordinate to the
whole, in a word dominance of logos.
In this regard, logos, the core, the center of the circle is seen at
different levels - from the logic of male-female (un)equality, through
social and cosmic-metaphysical relationship. Isidora Sekulić expects
upheaval, demolition, removal of the center and favoring of the language of
the margine or the periphery, which articulates the difference and
Otherness. Therefore her speech receives feature of a direct rebellion
against logocentric repression of a circle: "The circle is a disgusting
symbol of slavery and humor. To be a circle and in the circle means to be
trite and silly, to be at home all the time and always conscious. And no
matter how ingenious aesthetic and spirit of the law was when it wanted the
worlds and creatures and ideas to be curves and concaves, it is also
degenerate and vulgarised when it tightened the free and capricous curves
in the completion that return to themselves...the sky seems humiliated,
with its philistarly measured trajectories, with bourgeois and polite
removal from the way, and with fear and avoidance of fire, color, crashes
and disasters "(Sekulić 1995:103). We note that the narrator uses specific
epithets "philistine" and "bourgeois" on two occasions that obviosuly
identifies the logic of the circle (with a negative conotation) with the
rational arrangment as a product of the society, opposed to ectasy and
vitalism, freedom of the irrational and intuitive forces, and above all not
any more mimetic, but semiotic relation between the language and the world.
Besides the already observed aspects of the expressionist
spirituality and poetics, the case of Isidora Sekulić's Co-travellers
needs to be spoken about at least two important characteristics. The first,
the description of gender topoi male and female principles from a typical
woman's perspective, and the other is related to its sensitive and cynical
response to the national issue from 1912-1913 and the Balcan wars. This
only implies the hunch of the Great War desaster and the feeling of loss,
defeat rejection and detronization of the national values (such as, for
example Vidovdan cult of a great sculptor Ivan Meštrović), which
particularly culminated in the first collections of poetry and prose of
Miloš Crnjanski (Lyrics of Ithaca, 1919 and The Stories about Male,1920 ).
Let's first hold onto the first aspect: the texts "Longing" (Čežnja),
"The Torture" (Mučenje), "The Farewell" (Rastanak) and "Nostalgia"
(Nostalgija) indeed thematize erotic life, but it's not always done
directly with elevated narrative rhetoric. The text is being shaped from
the perspective of the male character (Nostalgia), towards who the author
feels almost religious devotion. Especially interesting is the position of
the dialog or questionable addressing a a man who, for example, in "The
Torture" takes on characteristics of his traditional civilization male
roles. From female narrator's point of view he is represented as a a poet,
priest, hero and king.
This text is highly relevant for the assessment of the author's
relationship with the opposite sex, which may be said to be ambivalent,
both affirmative and repellent, and a source of enthusiasm, adoration and
ecstasy on the one hand, but also fear, distrust and the threat on the
other. Let us therefore listen Sekulić's own words: "I do not know where
the solution is, where's the soothing, I do not understand you, I do not
comprehend you, I don't come after you and I don't love you. I'm afraid of
you, and I run away from you. And as I go where you go, crazy and
enchanted crazy and do what you want ... " (Sekulić 1995: 82). Here the
author emphasizes the very topos of gender antagonism, Jungian Animus and
Anima battle for mental and creative supremacy, but also something even
more interesting - a space for reflection on the conditions that determine
the diversity of the equality of human genders, and therefore the reasons
for failure or delay of their erotic communication, which is relevant from
the standpoint of contemporary psychoanalysis, philosophy and art. Isidora
Sekulic articulates subordination of the feminine to the male in "The
Torture" as interpreted by Croatian writer and critic Antun Gustav Matoš
(Matoš 1913: 533-557), which is best observed in the author's emphasizing
of the abstract ideas of the leader, some kind of the expressionistic "New
Man" (Der Neue Mensch) who is "the torch of win of those who are the only
and alone" (Sekulić 1995: 90). We will briefly analyze a short story
"Farewell" in which is narrated about what is absent in the male-female
relationship, and that influence, first on their bonding and falling in
love, and then, for very mysterious reasons, or divesting, and finally on
separation..
The author at the very beginning indicates that: "However, at this
first meeting, they didn't fell in love, or chose each other. They just
fenced in. It is a strange pre-sense in man. It is a fascination with
words. There are words that are coquetry of mind, heart, face, voice, teeth
and mouth. There's a dangerous cocoon of words, being waved around
you"(Sekulić 1995: 110). Using the word "fenced in" which bothered A. G.
Matoš so much whereas Jovan Skerlić did not even notice it, Isidora Sekulić
spoke openly about danger and a lack of communication between the sexes,
which remain sealed up within their spiritual and psychological "defensive
fortress". However, an this is particuraly interesting, people in love
first make contact in the verbal level. In the game of ambiguos word orbits
the main reason for women's attraction to a man is not beauty, but in the
art of "entaglements and disentaglements of words", in their "dance" that
hides more than it revelas, that is more confusing and shocking than
comforting and kissing that seduces and wins more than it defends itself.
And vice versa.This doubled dialectic of desire and loss, of attraction and
escape, the periphery and center, male and female makes Isidora Sekulić's
écriture subversive, but also open for overcome of a certain tendency at
the expence of the other (Stevanović 2012: 456).
The last aspect that brings short fiction of Isidora Sekulic
resulting to the immediate vicinity of expressionist spirituality is its
implicit condemnation of war and human suffering, so typical of the so-
called expressionist generation of "lost illusions". The collection Co-
travellers are unusual by virtue of their melancholy and pessimistic mood
that did not fit in the nationalistic awekening and utilitarian-normative
concept of literature as was then being regulated by Skerlić, who, as
lucidly Matoš observed, banned "modern Serbia to cry" (Matoš 1913:
555).However, the careful reader will note that Co-travellers, such as
Vladislav Petković's Dis poetry collection Drowned Souls (1911) deeply
spiritual and poetically correspond to their turbulent time, and by some
of its substantial atmosphere, to today's events in the Serbian history and
the complete disintegration of the human person, family, society, morals ,
politics and the nation as well. It is the final text of Isidora's
collection, an unusual prose poem written in the form of questionable and
therefore entitled "The Question", that undoubtedly indicates the bitter
sharpness of "Vidovdan's poems" of Miloš Crnjanski and horrowing, cynical
apotheosis of the metioned prose collection The Stories about Male (1920).
"The Question" of Isidora Sekulic indicates the whole absurdity and
irony of sacrifice of the young for the ideals of "selfish fatherland,
whose heart is big, selfish and warm, and contains the loyalty of all our
hearts" (Sekulić 1995: 134). Especially interesting is the discourse of
this lyrical prose, which is given in the form of gradual dialogue between
the narrator and seriously wounded that are being brought to the hosiptal
from the battlefield to the death bed. They are all " wounded sons of the
homeland they love love", although the first of which was brought with
"beaten legs," another with "torn chest," and the third with "shattered
head". And so on forever they brought someone's sons, brothers, husbands,
fathers, young people and the elderly who have offered up their lives on
the altar of "selfish fatherland." It is interesting that in this hour of
death they lose their individuality, and they respond as a collective we-
entity, saying the paradoxical fact that "in the heart of the motherland
there's neither truth nor justice", or that "the love for fatherland is an
obstacle for human love" to the ironic, aphoristic thoughts that "the
heart of the fatherland does not know what the fear of God is, or what is
the love for your own is" (Sekulić 1995:133). Yet, despite everything, the
wounded and the crippled are chanting "We love our fatherland,, even then
when their "blood clots in the throat, and when intestines in our hands we
carry". And after their burial, everything will be quickly forgotten and
the air will smell of champagne, just like in "The Apotheosis", the prose
poem of Crnjanski, in which the cynical toast for Banat is only a mask of
despair of the Serbian lost war generation in the Habsburg monarchy after
1918.
Therefore, was then the instinctive response of Isidora Sekulic a
withdrawal and self-isolation, a kind of a patient and traumatic
psychoanalysis that would help with introspection both herself and others,
because: "Oh, how wretched is the man who can not find out his self-
awareness, and who doesn't distinguish the essence from incrutial moments"
(Sekulić 1995:29). However, the later creative orientation of Isidora
Sekulic shows that her existential and female writer's impulse was
increasingly suppressed and mainly neutralized by turning the traditional
values, such as mother tongue, culture, nation, or God. Her rebellion
against every form of determinism and mechanical repetition of life cycles
has strongly marked only the first book of Isidora Sekuluć Co-travelers
leaving, however, permanent feature of an unusual expressionist stylistics
in the travelogue Letters from Norway (1914) as well, but primarily in the
erotic, associative, intuitive, and also precise style of her rich essays.
Bojana Stojanović Pantović: Isidora Sekulić as an early Serbian
expresionist", Section III: Literature and Cultural Studies, in: Creation
and Creativity, SINUC 2012, Conference Proceedings. Co. dr Maria Alexe and
Sebastian Chirimbu, Bucarest 2013, pp. 230-241, ISSN 2285-9209
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language. Oxford.Matoš, Anton Gustav.
1913. "Ples riječi" (The Dance of Words). Savremenik. Zagreb, VIII, 9,
553-557.
Sekulić, Isidora. 1995. Saputnici, Beograd. Plavi jahač.
Sekulić, Isidora. 1967. Nemiri u književnosti" (Riots in Literature). In:
Eseji, XX, Sarajevo.
Sokel, H. Walter. 1969. "Die Expressionistische Prosa". In: Wolfgang Rothe
(Hrsg.): Expressionismus als Literatur. Gessamelte Studien. Bern-München,
143-169
Stevanović, Kristina. 2012. Naratološke inovacije u zbirci Saputnici
Isidore Sekulić" (Narratological inovations in the collection Co-travellers
by Isidora Sekulić" In: Zbornik Matice srpske za književnost i jezik, knj.
LIX, sv. 2/2011, 329-240.
Stojanović Pantović, Bojana. 1997. Isidorin gambit (Isidora's gambit).
Letopis Matice srpske. 459, 3, 341-349.
( 1998. Srpski ekspresionizam (Serbian Expressionism). Novi Sad. Matica
srpska.
( 2003. Morfologija ekspresionističke proze (Morphology of the
Expressionist Prose). Beograd. Artist.
Vietta, Silvio/Kemper,Georg. 1976. Expressionismus. Frankfurt A/M. UTB.
Vučković, Radovan. 1979. Poetika hrvatskog i srpskog ekspresionizma
(Poetics of the Croation and Serbian Expressionism). Sarajevo. Svjetlost.
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Born in Belgrade, Serbia (1960). Researcher in Expressionistic Movement in
the Serbian, South-Slavonic and European literature, Gender Studies,
Contemporary poetry. Critic, poet and translator.
Selected works: Serbian Expressionism (1998), Morphology of the Short
Expressionist Prose 2003), Rebellion against the Centre ( 2006), Spans of
Modernism ( 2011), Prose poem or prozaida (1912). Editor and co-author of
the Conscise Dictionary of Comparative Therminology in the Literature and
Culture (2011).
-----------------------
[1] All quotations of Sekulić's prose are translated by the author of this
paper.
