Review article
The Experience of Violence and Suffering in Aleksandar Tišma’s Novels
Vesna Bratić
; Faculty of Philology, University of Montenegro
Abstract
The essay deals with evil, violence, crime and death in Aleksandar Tišma's novels The Use of Man and The Book of Blam as the author's constant preoccupations and the focal points of his poetics. Tišma is fascinated by evil as a phenomenon, by human cruelty and the conditions for its manifestations. Both novels are set in WWII and post-WWII period and mainly draw on the Holocaust-related events and their consequences for the survivors/ victims, leaving less space for the villains themselves, evil being the most manifest in its consequences. Tišma presents us with a world utterly hopeless and human beings in it fragile, hapless and ultimately doomed. His is a mechanistic view of human beings as machines-bodies subject to irreversible damage and decay. Somewhere in there, inside that sophisticated mechanism, this bloody web of nerves and muscles, lies hidden what we call soul, the deepest vulnerable self, for which the author offers neither hope nor consolation. Such insistence on evil and suffering as is present in Tišma's narratives will deter many a reader. If we dismiss as improbable the possibility of sadistic pleasure derived from the suffering of others, given the sympathy for the sufferer that the author shows on a few important occasions in the novels, we reach two possible answers: Tišma's narratives focus so much on evil either due to a subconscious, almost magical urge to restrain it and contain it within a narrative in order to overcome it or in order to uncover what is behind a criminal mind, again to contain it within knowable limits and rationalize it. There is, however, nothing transcendental about the narrative or its purpose – the author does not abandon the materialistic and mechanistic view of man, and the existential realism, or rather, naturalism of Tišma's only opens a view to a deep chasm of bestiality in man on the one hand and, on the other, it shows us humans at our most vulnerable. Examining the darkest corners of human mind, Tišma uncovers our lowest point – it is where a human being is capable of objectification-reification of the other. Therefore, in the first of his novels considered here, human beings are reduced to the inanimate, whereas in the other they live plagued by the survivor's shame. Both novels, apart from bearing witness to an era, are also an existential cry to the God one does not believe in. One of his story collections is entitled School of Atheism and it seems this is the school he wants us to attend – we should walk on this earth as if it were Dante's Inferno – abandoning hope altogether.
Keywords
narrative; evil; suffering; trauma; WWII; reification; body
Hrčak ID:
188724
URI
Publication date:
3.10.2017.
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