L’ultima meta: L’isola (Ostrvo) di Meša Selimović

The last destination The island (Ostrvo), the last novel written by the great Serbian writer from Bosnia, Meša Selimović, was printed in 1974 in Belgrade, as its publication in Sarajevo had met with many political obstacles. This book is a radical departure from the author’s major novels (Death and the Dervish, 1966 and The Fortress, 1970) and up to today it has been his least appreciated and studied work. The present work offers an in-depth reading of its textual (formal and thematic) and contextual (in the historical) reality, its interaction with the previous works and with the author’s autobiography as an essential part of the opus (Sjećanja, Memories, 1976). The first chapter is dedicated to an autobiographical events that had a determining impact on the development of his poetics. Starting from his early activity in the Partisan movement and then with his political commitment to Socialism, Selimović indeed was a constant protagonist of the reality of his time, an era of great ideals and hopes but also of great contradictions and dramatic conflicts. His engagement with politics never wavered notwithstanding the contrasts and the conflicts that had developed as early as 1944 when his brother, also a Partisan, was murdered by order of the same Communist Party of Bosnia. The Yugoslavian political context of that period, in particular of the Sixties and of the early Seventies, constitutes the subtext of the novel The island. The second chapter is an overview of the positions of literary criticism that from the very publication of the book underlined its alterity from all of the author’s previous production particularly its fragmentary nature, establishing the still current view that The island is an “isolated” case in the whole Selimović’s work. The structure of the novel is analysed in the third chapter. In place of a real plot, there are nineteen unnumbred short story chapters, each one with a title of its own, dedicated to moments or aspects of the life of an old married couple, Ivan and Katarina Marić (principally his life, sometimes both of their lives, more rarely her's). They spent the last part of their lives on the island, living in a sort of exile which condemned them to solitude and to remembrance. The chronological relation of the different parts of the narration is uncertain, these story-chapters do not build a “story“, but they rather shed light on the two protagonists' dynamics, problems, events and above all reflections and memories. An omniscient narrator leads the narration leaving ample space to dialogues, protagonists' reflections, frequent interior monologues in free direct speech, with an internal mostly mutable focusing. Gradually a picture emerges, even if somewhat fragmentary, of the protagonist’s existence as individuals and as a couple, from the times before their marriage up to their experiences during World War II, and then to life in the new reality in Yugoslavia up to the current times on the island. In spite of the weak narrative construction, thematically and structurally fragmentary, it is possible to perceive a development internal to the narration and a sort of structure in which the meanings of the text articulate along thematic threads in appearance rhapsodically woven into the various stories. The development of this texture reveals the evolution, both on the thematic and on the formal technical level, of the premises laid out in Selimović’s previous work, so that it is possible to affirm that The island is the last destination of the writer’s artistic route. In the forth chapter the personalities of the protagonists are analysed. Katarina's character is undoubtedely less highlighted than her huseband's . Sensitive and ingenuous, but ready to reflect on the problematic aspects of reality, she tends towards victimism, living solitude on the island with great pain but, in spite of the deterioration of the marital relationship, she remains fond of her husband. The main themes in the novel are embodied more by Ivan. As critics of The island have observed, Ivan is unlike any of the protagonists in Selimovic's previous novels. He not only lacks the traits that characterised those protagonists but appears to have a marked deficiency in those very traits, a sort of minus value to show where those traits have been subtracted. Furthermore, his characterisation is regurarly exposed to effects of irony, or rather of the grotesque which constitutes the stylistic code of the narration of the more relevant episodes. The analysis shows that Ivan is in opposition particularly to Ahmet Šabo of The fortress, the novel which preceeds The island by three years. But if Šabo manages to mantain intact his humanity and moral integrity, remaining anchored to his own moral values and choosing to remain on the fringes of a corrupted and brutal system, in The island because of the corrosive action of irony and of grotesque, Ivan is a “degraded hero“, closed in himself and, in spite of his age, still unsure about the fundamental values of his existence. The fifth chapter deals with a particular dimension of the book, the political-ideological one. On the background of this work, indeed, as well as in the folds of the fragmented and grotesque narration, there is the historical-cultural space in which it was born: Yugoslavia of the last Sixties and of the early Seventies. It was a crucial phase for the development of the young socialist State, full of hopes and dramatic contradictions, which instead of leading to the achievement of “socialism with a human face“ and of integral justice, paves the way to the violent dissolution of the federation. The political-ideological perspective of the text offers an extratextual key useful to contextualise some of the multiple meanings of the novel. As a matter of fact there emerges a typical selimovićian theme, the harsh criticism of ideologies as absolute values, but also an effective criticism of the actual historical reality of that time when Yugoslavia, confronted with corruption, with economical, social and cultural crisis, the dream of building a socialist society seemed already to have been shattered. In the sixth chapter the theme of the word, a recurring and fundamental thematic in Selimović's writing, is shown in its final evolution in this the last of his novels. It is specifically on the idea of the word that Ivan Marić (together with the whole narrative texture of the novel) differentiates most from other selimovićian characters. Just as The Fortress appears for various aspects as an enlighted counterpoint to the terrible and gloomy dervish's story, so too in various ways The island is a counterpoint to Šabo's story with a main character deprived of his youth, of the power of love and of the faith in words. The analysis shows that when the author renounces the narrative illusion deriving from the dislocation of stories and characters in another time (in Ottoman Bosnia) and so in another cultural and social space, when the contemporary world enters his literary universe, the virtuous circle between reality and narration is broken and in this crack postmoderniy settles: a story made of stories, stories made of fragments, and in empty spaces among fragments, a reality for which there are no more words. In the crumbling narrative texture of The Island neither masking nor allegories can reveal the failures and serious contradictions in the Yugoslavian society of that period. The fragmented and seemingly unsubstantial narration completely deconstructs the official regime's narrative about a society faithfully involved in building socialism. In The island the narrative illusion is destroyed, crushed in a fragmented writing where it is difficult to identify a point of view. The character of Ivan is below the threshold of narration: in a reality which proves the dominant cultural narrative wrong (fraternity and unity, justice, humanistic socialism, construction of the integral man and justice), it seems that, quoting Steiner, “the image of the world is receding from the communicative grasp of the word.“