ADDITIONAL TESTIMONY. PHOTOGRAPHS IN THE PROSE OF DAŠA DRNDIĆ

In this paper I will reflect on the role of photographs in the works of Daša Drndić. Mixing fictional and documentary modes is a characteristic feature of her texts. It is achieved, among other ways, by utilizing visual representations of the past. In my paper I aim to outline the strategies of visualization applied by the authoress (especially the traumatic, Holocaust-related experience), which materialize through photographs included in her works of literature. In the case of Drndić’s works, the visuals include, for instance, contemporary or archival photographs of places marked by the Holocaust and of Jewish inhabitants of Vienna, as well as portraits of war criminals. Generally speaking, in her texts, photographs function as concretisation of the memory of injustice, of trauma and ultimately of the Holocaust. Photographs are by no means neutral images, though they are commonly perceived as such. Interaction between the text (itself skirting the boundary between fact and fiction) and the image puts the latter in a position that is far from neutral. In Drndić’s case, photographs are often used as an inventory (archival) practice, but they constitute predominantly a way of overcoming the crisis, related to the intention of giving an account of the past, particularly a testimony on the Holocaust.


Introduction
The focus of this article is literature that reveals the mediatory role of photographs in the novels by the Croatian author Daša Drndić. The analysis of this role relies on the categorization of the use of photographs in literary works described by the Polish literary scholars Marta Koszowy and Michał Paweł Markowski. Here, the term 'photograph' is not limited to a physical printed image, as it is in colloquial use. There are three basic forms of photographic presence in a work of literature: a narrative description of a photo which the narrator or protagonist sees or recalls (photograph as a subject); a photo which appears in the work directly, meaning that photos are incorporated into the text, although they were originally separate entities 1 ; and finally, a narration can be conducted in such a way that the very act of seeing becomes similar to the act of photographing (a description with a particular visualization technique, which reveals its kinship with photography). A monograph by Polish literary scholar Marta Koszowy analyzes how photographs are presented in literature (Koszowy 2002). Her basic classification, which indicates three models of using photos in a text -each of them determining a slightly different literary reference to reality -has been seminal to the following analysis of the presence of photographs in the works of Croatian author Daša Drndić. Generally, photographs appear in these texts in two forms: either they are included in the text as finished objects, paratextual ready-mades, so that the recipient takes on the role of a spectator, or the photos are evoked by the text itself and impose on the recipient the role of a reader 2 . In the former case the photograph has a predominantly illustrative role, while in the latter it completes and enhances the meaning of the text (though not always in a form approving of what is expressed through the language). The text in this case places particular emphasis on representations of reality that evoke events carrying a clear burden of negative emotions, connected with 1 François Soulages distinguishes three types of relation between a photograph and a text: a connection based on combining two originally separate artefacts; a genetic relation (when a text has been inspired by a photo); and an intermingling of both arts, which produces a new quality (a collage, an album etc.) (Soulages 2007: 311-314).
2 These two models of photographic presence in literature are described by Anna Łebkowska (Łebkowska 2004: 115). exclusion and traumatic experiences which often include (though are not limited to) events from the time of World War II.
The starting point for Koszowy and other scholars who problematize the function of a photograph in a literary text are four models of representation, each of them based on a different reference system. The notion of representation can invoke mimesis, which refers to the principle of faithfulness, or substitution, which connotes creating an effect of genuineness (Markowski 2006: 290-291). First, Michał Paweł Markowski distinguishes epistemological representation in which representation replaces reality (as reality itself is unavailable) and is transformed into its image or idea, constructed by the subject (Markowski 2006: 319). There is also an ontological representation based on the premises that what is represented is in fact fully present in the representation itself; the latter does not disappear, however, (as it is a part of the essence of existence itself) but rather moves over to somehow accommodate the former (Markowski 2006: 324). The third model is aesthetic representation, the aim of which is to replace the reality with a perfectly autonomous sphere of representation, which has nothing in common with the reality (Markowski 2006: 326-327). Markowski refers to the fourth kind of representation as apophatic representation: it assumes an unconquerable distance between the representation and what is represented. This model is constructed in opposition to the previous three models since the image itself does not bring the experience of presence, even if it suggests such an experience (Zalewski 2010: 304).
Though based on Markowski's conclusions, Koszowy describes only three ways of mediating reality in literature: referential relation, based on the adherence of the photograph to the world; fragmentary relation, in which it is essential that the adherence is only partial, as the photograph's connotations reach beyond what it directly presents, and its reference includes only a fragment of the world, which without a full context can be received in a wrong way and misunderstood; and apophatic relation. Each relation is based on a different way of understanding photographs and their mediatory character. As stated by Koszowy, "a photograph is an intermediary in experiencing the world, is the foundation of the story and a filter, through which the narrator perceives the world. The way a photograph is used in literature reveals how the reality is perceived and experienced" (Koszowy 2002: 48). Although in the quoted passage Koszowy speaks about the narrator, it seems also justified to connect the way in which a photograph is used in a given literary text with the way in which the author of this text perceives the world, pointing to the feedback loop existing between these two aspects.

Daša Drndić's Project
The photographic mediation used by Drndić in her works is very complex. This complexity is enhanced by the heterogeneous character of her texts which combine different genre traditions (diary, literary fiction, essay, dialogue forms), use various forms (monologue, dialogue, letter, newspaper clipping) and employ different media (textual and visual). The photographs Drndić includes in her books vary thematically. An inexperienced reader could receive the impression that they are a chaotic, accidental collection, though they in fact are not.
In Drndić's works there are photographs which should be read using a modernistic 3 interpretation, in which a photograph's role is discovery (epiphanic potential), faithful representation, and ultimately mimetic representation. These are photos which are direct testimonies and have the power to present their subjects (photographs of places, people and things). Their predominant function is illustrative (referential mediation). In such cases the relation between the text and the visual material seems to not be problematic. Here, text denotes the image, supplementing the recipient's knowledge of what can be seen in the photograph. One such example is the photo of Risiera di San Sabba, located on the outskirts of Trieste, which was transformed by the Nazis into a concentration camp (Drndić 2010: 255-266).
Let us recall here a fundamental feature of apophatic representation as discussed by Markowski. In this model the way that the photograph mediates between the world and the text is based on the assumption that the "world is experienced through the photograph negatively", that it "is a sphere of desiring a presence" (Koszowy 2002: 28). Mediation of this kind stems from the loss of faith in the indexing power of the picture to present the world (Belting 2007: 224) 4 . Apophatic mediation offers a way out of the impasse imposed by the sense of a crisis of representation which results from the absence of Holocaust witnesses (Agamben 2009) and from the prohibition of aestheticization (Adorno 1975). The very words which attempt to characterize apophatic mediation evoke associations with such representation whose aim is to evoke something that used to exist; this in turn directly interacts with the space of absence left in post-WWII Europe by the Jews. This kind of representation is dominant in Drndić's works, as she almost obsessively returns to the topic of the Holocaust. Drndić focuses on the absence, meticulously tracing in today's world the signs of forgetting about suffering (of the Jews, but not only). She uses certain narrative strategies that can be associated with postmodern poetics whichconscious of the crisis of representation -attempt to overcome it by searching for new ways of giving testimony about the world and strategies of displaying absence.
The apophatic model is most evident in the fragments of the text April u Berlinu (April in Berlin, Drndić 2009), in which Drndić pairs photographs (mostly portraits) which survived the Holocaust and contemporary photographs of house numbers and the fronts of the tenement houses where the photographed people once lived. The photos are accompanied by short, often incomplete biographies of the former residents. Sample notes attached to the photos include "Bertha Herzl (born 1 Sept 1887) and her husband Nathan (born 6 June 1884). Lived in the 2 nd district at 35 Rembrandtstraße. Deported to Riga 3 Dec 1941 and subsequently shot in a nearby forest" (Drndić 2009: 221) 5 , and "Worker Leopold Götzel, born 18 May 1898 in Vienna. Lived in the 2 nd district at 230/7/5 Engerthstraße. He escaped to France, where on 4 Sept 1942 he was interned in Drancy. Later deported to Auschwitz and murdered there" (Drndić 2009: 226) 6 .
The photographs and accompanying biographies bring to life a longgone time and world. The images are suspended between life and death, movement and stillness. Photography, whose immanent function is confirmation of authenticity, in a way bridges the gap between the impossibility of recovering and the necessity of repetition, which are constitutive elements of the sense of loss. Another attempt to bridge this gap is even more evident in the fragments of EEG (Drndić 2016). In this work the reader is not confronted with the photographs included in the pages. There, Drndić uses a different strategy: the act of narration itself equates the act of taking a photograph, the description itself evoking images of the past. It should be specified here that the relevant fragments do not function as a narrative description of a photo; they are not static frames. Their structure reveals kinship with a film watched by the reader as if in slow motion. Movie connotations are invoked by the phrase the author uses to emphasize the fact that the past permeates the present: we read that something is emerging, is approaching "from beyond the frame [Croat.
Drndić uses the form of montage to juxtapose locations in the centre of modern Zagreb with the -probably partly imaginary -"moving image" of the same area seventy years before. "Let us imagine a randomly chosen address in Zagreb centre. Let it be today's 16 Tesla St., where the Vuković and Runjić bookstore is located. Let us imagine that through the display full of books passes a projection in which we see the 'Radio' shop, located in the same building, at the same place, which was then 16 Nikolicia St. Let us imagine the year is 1940. Let us imagine that we are looking through the shop window at Josef Konforti, born in Travnik in 1912, who is talking to the customers in his shop, surrounded by radios, bicycles, typewriters and sewing machines, while other merchants are looking through new editions of local and foreign authors. Josef Konforti was killed in Jasenovac in 1944" (Drndić 2016: 322) The author's strategies -using an authentic photograph as well as narrating the text so that it resembles a dynamic frame -can be traced to the desire for presence which reveals actual absence. "A cobbler Gabriel Kalderon born in Bitola in 1901, lives in 94 Vlaška St. He moved from Bitola to Zagreb in 1932. He lives here with his wife and four children […] His eldest son, eighteen-year-old Yakov is killed in an Ustashe camp in Jadovno and he, Gabriel Kalderon, with his remaining family are captured in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz. We see him on the ground floor of 94 Vlaška St. as he is sitting in his dark shop, turning a worn woman's shoe in his hands. Next to him sits a boy who is hammering something, and through the window on the floor above we see a woman bent over a cooker; with one hand she is stirring the pot and with the other she is holding a laughing girl on her hip. Through this huge moving picture we can see the sign of the Pletix shop, in which -right here, in 94 Vlaška St. -you can buy swimsuits and underwear; right next to it you can see the hairdressing salon Trans-X where a woman is sitting under a hood, reading »Gloria«" (Drndić 2016: 322) 8 . Such descriptions are indeed apophatic mediation in which a "literary photograph resembles a curtain attempting to hide death emerging from behind the image" (Koszowy 2002: 167). The frames simultaneously make present and highlight the effect of absence. Mediation of this kind also assumes that experiencing reality through a photograph is marked by the absence of the object represented and, closely related to it, a golema projekcija trgovine "Radio", smještena u istoj zgradi, na istome mjestu, tada na adresi Nikolićeva 16. Zamislimo da je godina 1940. Zamislimo da u izlogu vidimo Josefa Konfortija, rođenog u Travniku 1912., kako u svom dućanu razgovara s mušterijama, okružen radioaparatima, biciklima, pisaćim i šivaćim strojevima, dok drugi neki kupci listaju nova izdanja domaćih i inozemnih pisaca. Josef Konforti ubijen je u Jasenovcu 1944. godine" (Drndić 2016: 322). 8 "Postolar Gabriel Kalderon, rođen u Bitoli 1941., stanuje u Vlaškoj 94. Iz Bitole se u Zagreb doseljava 1932. Živi sa suprugom i četvero djece.
[…] Najstariji mu je sin, osamnaestogodišnji Jakov, ubijen u ustaškom logoru Jadovno, a on, Gabriel Kalderon, s ostatkom obitelji 1943. uhapšen je i deportiran u Auschwitz. Vidimo ga kako u prizemlju Vlaške 94 u svojoj polumračnoj radionici sjedi na niskoj hohlici i prevrće iznošenu žensku cipelu. Pokraj njega sjedi muško djete i nešto kucka, a kroz otvoren prozor na katu pratimo kako žena nad štednjakom jednom rukom nešto u loncu miješa dok drugom na boku drži djevojčicu koja se smije. Ispod projekcije ove goleme fotografije nazire se reklamni pano trgovine Pletix u kojoj se, tu, u Vlaškoj 94, prodaju kupaći kostimi i donje roblje, a odmah do nje vidimo kako u frizerskom salonu Trans-X pod haubom sjedi žena i čita "Gloriju"" (Drndić 2016: 322). desire for its presence. This leads to two attitudes: "confirmation of the existence of defective reality full of gaps by masking and hiding its deficiencies, by filling empty spaces with probable and genuine […] phantoms, as well as disavowing the reality -revealing its deficiencies and creating in its place a string of phantasmatic analogues" (Koszowy 2002: 50). The past, as Drndić seems to say, exists as long as it is summoned. This act of summoning/recovering the past resembles developing a photo, a process that makes present a moment which is irretrievably gone (Czaja 2009: 71) 9 . Existence is confronted here with a gap, a fracture left by the Holocaust. In Drndić's text, framing and zooming in are important strategies of re-presentation: with them the author unmasks the difference between what was and what is now (by juxtaposing frames from the past with those from the present). The writer raises the dead, reactivating the past -but this is an illusory resurrection as she fully realizes that the world she invokes has ceased to exist. It is alive only when its story is told, the presence of persons recalled from non-existence is fleeting and the reality the reader perceives is a world already marked by death. The final sentences of the narrative frames are very significant in this context: "Josef Konforti was murdered in Jasenovac in 1944" (Drndić 2016: 322); "Avram Levi is killed by Ustashe in Jasenovac in 1942" (Drndić 2016: 323) 10 ; "The blue eye of Optocentrum follows the springing steps of Leon Altarac down to the execution place in Jasenovac where the lights die out for Leon Altarac for ever" (Drndić 2016: 323) 11 ; "This evening Moise Salom will not manage to climb up to his hotel room. Two youth from the Ustashe police come to his table and take him away. Moise Salom was killed in Jasenovac in 1942" (Drndić 2016: 325) 12 . The frames both record life and foretell death, pointing to the fleeting existence of the past world, to its vestigial character.
What is left is the unfulfillable desire for presence -presence founded on the conviction that the past exists as long as it is recalled (and thus remembered) 13 .
What is particularly important for this analysis is the apophatic model as it assumes that reality cannot be captured in words, so the gap between the order of words and the order of things should be widened. As Michał P. Markowski writes, "the apophatic model leads to two solutions that are polar opposites of each other, yet they […] stem from the same conviction regarding radical incommunicability between the representation and what is represented. One solution is extreme iconoclasm, or abandoning any techniques of representation […]. The other is intensification of representation techniques resulting from the conviction that it is impossible to represent anything" (Markowski 2006: 325). Even this initial consideration of the particular features of this model leads to a debate on the way of presenting such extreme events as the Holocaust. Its motto could be the already classic conclusion of Theodor Adorno that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. This statement by the German philosopher is somewhat opposed by artistic attempts to represent what may be considered unrepresentable and what -consequently -should not be subjected to aestheticization. Disintegration of form, combining contradictory discourses, interrupting linear narration with the variety of expository forms and visual elements that are present in Drndić's works in the context of writing about the Holocaust -can be considered an attempt to contradict Adorno's thesis. The Croatian writer seems to be looking for a new way to talk about the Holocaust, one that will not only move the recipients but will also (or perhaps above all) help them get closer to the essence of those events. Przemysław Czapliński associates this type of artistic experiment with the specificity of post-Holocaust literature which "is becoming […] writing and thinking against oneself -practising multiplicity and contradiction, continuously testing a variety of narrative patterns, constant shifts of perspective, a search for a language which cannot be reduced to a notion" (Czapliński 2004: 12).
Even though the text and images in these examples are intertwined, the text does sometimes seem to be entirely disjointed from the image. This occurs when the image (stripped of surplus information) communicates something entirely different than the text. In such cases we experience a particular fracture, divergence of the two orders, which raises questions concerning the suitability and responsibility of representation (Leśniak 2010: 164). This happens when we look at the photos of a mongrel, a St. Bernard-like dog Barry, the favourite pet of Kurt Franz (lover of the protagonist in the novel Sonnenschein and at the same time a real figure -a deputy commandant at the Treblinka concentration camp). In the photo we see a fluffy creature sitting on the ground (Drndić 2010: 145). However, when this image is combined with the knowledge that the dog was brutal and blindly obedient, and that one of Franz's favourite pastimes was setting the dog on prisoners with the command "Man, take dog", we become uneasy, slightly confused by the divergence of the visual and textual message.
The photograph next to Barry's picture is a slightly different case. It presents Kurt Franz with his mother and an unknown man. The photo was probably taken by an amateur (as it is not very well framed) most likely during a walk, perhaps as the son was visiting his family home. The mother and son are smiling. However, the photo is not neutral: it presents a conventional scene, but the joy evident in the picture is disturbed when the reader perceives the fact that the son is wearing a uniform. The photo was taken in 1937. Both in the case of this picture and the former (of Barry the dog) the recipient adds what is not in the given photo: the terror of looking is not necessarily located in the image but rather in the story with which the recipient completes what has been omitted (Hirsch 2010: 252), a clear sign of this family's affiliation with Nazi institutions. According to Susan Sontag, every photograph demands a story (Sontag 2005). Sontag pointed indirectly to a certain naturalness of combining text and image, a symbiosis that exists between visual and literary material. However, it is most interesting when this assumed symbiosis has been disturbed, when what the photograph really communicates diverges from what it was intended to communicate. Such a fracture most frequently results from the recipients' knowledge of the context or their ability to read signs from the past differently than contemporaries do (which can also be attributed to the accumulation of knowledge). Unlike a painting, a photograph can be used as evidence, although it is well known today that a photographed image can be manipulated as well because "[t]o photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude" (Sontag 2002: 46).
Drndić's texts contain photographs that disturb the recipient and arouse unpleasant emotions, thus having an affective influence. They contain a deposit of certain surplus. They can be labelled as traumatic photographs even though they are not direct evidence of trauma. Such photos do not thematise trauma directly, they are not its vestiges, yet they capture what is not experienced and not realized 14 . According to Roland Barthes, some photographs incline recipients towards reflection. They suggest meanings not always convergent with the text, creating association-based relations as " [u]ltimately, photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks" (Barthes 1982: 38). In Drndić's work such disquieting vestiges are the photographs which at first glance do not problematize the Holocaust. Although they seem to suggest it, such reference is not easily discernible. One such afterimage of the Holocaust is the photograph of a doll with a hole in her head, included in the novel Belladonna. The photo is accompanied by a story about an Italian who collects unneeded and damaged dolls (Drndić 2012: 134-135). This image is unsettling as it seems to refer both to the image of a dead body that has been brutally murdered (and is not the very figure of a doll -an artificial, miniature human doppelganger -by itself unsettling) and to the piles of artefacts that remain after people were murdered at Auschwitz 15 . What is moving to the recipient does not come from the level of the photograph but rather emerges from what has been deduced based on knowledge from beyond the frame, based on certain culturally internalized associations. In the face of the crisis of representation, such photographs can become a means to communicate experience that cannot be expressed through language. We can have a similar experience when looking at the photo of the Ovits family, 14 These ideas have been inspired by the considerations of Ulrich Baer, who in his book Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, discussed the relations between the photographic medium and trauma (Baer 2005). 15 The association between a pile of children's toys and the fate of the Jews is explicitly articulated as the narrator of Sonnnenschein visits the toy museum in Nuremberg. "When Birkenau was liberated, what was found besides gold teeth, besides hair and clothes, were toys, many of which came from Nuremberg. Deprived of hair and naked, without legs, often without eyes, resembling their little owners. In camps, as is known, objects and people become united. They become symbiotic" (Drndić 2010: 341). members of the so-called Lilliput Troupe, experimented on by Dr Mengele (Drndić 2012: 145). The uneasiness that accompanies the reception of this photograph stems from knowing the fate of the people it presents.
Drndić's photographical material is varied and the visual medium seems to have different functions. Notably, it often completes the textual narration, illustrates the text or is a kind of surplus, apparently unconnected to the literary material. In all her books Drndić consistently follows the imperative of remembering. Despite the physical absence of the past world, the visual testimonies she employs preserve at least its recorded image.

Conclusion
Generally speaking, the photographs in Drndić's texts function as concretizations of the memory of injustice and trauma, and ultimately of the Holocaust. Interaction between the text (itself skirting the boundary between fact and fiction) and the image puts the latter in a position that is far from neutral. In Drndić's case however, the photos are often used as an inventory (archival) practice, and they predominantly constitute a way to overcome the crisis of representation of traumatic events, related to the intention of giving an account a of the Holocaust.
Translated by Izabela Dąbrowska