Esther Reichek
Lend Me Your Character, Open Letter, 240 pages, $16.95
The writer Dubravka Ugrešić died this past March. Born in Kutina in 1949, Ugrešić made a name for herself in 1980s Zagreb teaching at the Institute for Literary Theory and writing sharp, ironic fiction that wore with aplomb the marks of Russian formalism. When the Wars of Yugoslav Succession broke out in 1991—the beginning of the complex, multi-phasal unraveling of the diverse nation that comprised the republics Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia, as well as autonomous provinces Vojvodina and Kosovo—Ugrešić and her neighbors hunkered down in the basement of their building while air-raid sirens sounded above. After a short stint lecturing at Wesleyan while penning columns for a Dutch newspaper on American culture and the war at home, she returned to Zagreb in 1992. Shortly after her return, she published an essay (first in German in Die Zeit, then in English in The Independent) skewering Croatian nationalism and ethnic cleansing by using the readymade metaphor of air freshener: “The magic spray-formula, clean Croatian air, cleanses Croatian territory not only of 'Byzantines' but of all internal enemies who are insufficiently good Croats: 'saboteurs', 'traitors', 'villains', 'anti-Tudjman commandos' and 'Commies'.”
Nationalist Croatian writers quickly seized on the essay, declaring Ugrešić a traitor and a public enemy. The media then took over; nationalist weekly the Globus accused Ugrešić, along with fellow anti-nationalist feminists writer Slavenka Drakulić, academic Rada Iveković, and journalists Vesna Kesić and Jelena Lovrić, of being “witches” who had hijacked Croatia’s bid for Dubrovnik to host the 1993 World PEN Conference. Ugrešić became a pariah at the Institute; she resigned in 1993, moving to Germany before eventually settling in Amsterdam. Though she continued to write in Croatian, she identified as a post-national writer. (Ugrešić was one of the signatories of the Declaration on the Common Language, the 2017 document that contended that Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia share a common standard language.)
The first Ugrešić I ever read was the essay “The Confiscation of Memory,” a mid-90s reflection on Yugo-nostalgia that ends with a riff on Cicero’s rhetorical treatise De Oratore. There, Cicero describes a feast to which the Greek lyric poet Simonides is invited. This is the same Simonides who, according to Herodotus, composed the epitaphs for the 300 at Thermopylae. Though we have only fragments of his poetry, it seems fair to say that he was an elegiac sad sack. And no wonder: back at the banquet, according to Cicero, Simonides gets a message that someone is looking for him and leaves the festivities; while he’s gone, the roof collapses, killing everyone else. Simonides recalls where each of the dead sat and is thus able to identify the remains of the victims to their grieving relatives. Simonides’s recollection represents the birth of memory. Ugrešić adapts the Ciceronian version to explain the traumatic disintegration of Yugoslavia. In her retelling,
Simonides, asked by the relatives to identify the victims, does not manage to do his mnemotechnical job, because suddenly the remaining walls collapse, killing him and the relatives who had come to bury their dead. The new witnesses of the scene, struck by this double misfortune, are, admittedly, in a position to identify the victims, but only those they remember from the places where they happened to be when the remaining walls collapsed.
The “double misfortune” is both political and literary: the community has died, but so too has the poet. For Ugrešić, politics and literature were always closely intertwined. Lend Me Your Character, a new edition of Ugrešić’s early short stories, supplemented by extensive afterwords, emphasizes the political protest incipient in Ugrešić’s early formalist fiction. Each story, with the exception of “Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button,” has been published multiple times before in English; Celia Hawkesworth and Michael Henry Heim have been translating Ugrešić since the early 1990s. What’s new are Ugrešić’s recent commentaries on her work from decades ago: “How to Ruin Your Own Heroine” and “De l’horrible danger de la lecture.” The violent caesurae of war and exile separate the Ugrešić of the 1980s, who would later describe herself as having been as happy as a mouse with a hunk of cheese, from the Ugrešić of 2022. The combination of these two Ugrešić figures results in a one-woman polyphony, the song of an individual capacious enough to constitute a dissident polity.
The oldest and longest story in the collection, “Štefica Cvek in the Jaws of Life,” was published in Croatian in 1981, and first translated into English in 1992. The “little patchwork novel” is about one Štefica Cvek, a lovelorn girl who lives with her elderly aunt. (Spoiler: she meets a guy.) But Ugrešić’s modern love satire is quite literally a multidimensional text. A series of symbols in the margins of the story demands audience participation. Each sign represents a design imperative. A dotted line, for instance, means “Take in: The text may be taken in as required with critical darts.”
Such a move might be read as clumsy or self-involved in hands less skilled than Ugrešić’s. Isn’t the idea a little hackneyed, that storytelling, like weaving, has always been to some extent women’s work? (To drive the point home, the story ends with a chorus of older women offering advice and opinions.) But Ugrešić is too quick to allow a smug smirk on the reader’s lips. The story’s epilogue, “Finishing Touches,” is complicated by “How to Ruin Your Own Heroine.” The former situates Štefica Cvek in the realm of women’s fiction, romance and fairy tale; the latter provides a commentary on the intertextual influences behind her.
An interest in intertextuality means an interest in history. This idea is the heart of Ugrešić’s style. She’s as much a high formalist as she is a postmodernist. In “How to Ruin Your Own Heroine,” Ugrešić recalls a reader in Zagreb’s critique of Štefica as an unrelatable heroine because “I am not overweight like she is”:
“Well I can’t identify with Raskolnikov, either,” I said. “Why?” she asked. “Because I can’t imagine walking around, murdering little old ladies,” I said. The part of the exchange about Raskolnikov was my fabrication. The first part, sadly, was not.
The other stories in Lend Me Your Character (“A Hot Dog in a Warm Bun”; “Who Am I?”; “Life Is a Fairy Tale”; “The Kharms Case”; “The Kreutzer Sonata”; “Lend Me Your Character”; “Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button”)—which together form “Life Is a Fairytale,” the second part of the book—are also highly intertextual. This complex interplay of influences and voices creates a kind of worthy paranoia in Ugrešić. She’s prepared to be misread and misunderstood. And for good reason: far less innocuous than the readers who saw Štefica as a Bridget Jones lite were the Croatian media who drove Ugrešić from her home. (Globus lost the defamation lawsuit against Ugrešić but continued to target her, publishing an interview with a colleague who denounced her decades after she left Croatia.)
What characterizes this edition of Lend Me Your Character are Ugrešić’s anticipatory attempts to tell her readers how she wants to be read. She’s ready for her audience to miss the joke, fail the intertextuality exam. As she writes in the author’s notes that conclude the book, “nothing irritates critics more than an author inviting them to remember texts they are assumed to have read.” Thus Ugrešić parses her own work. She tells us that “A Hot Dog in a Warm Bun” is not just an extended dick joke but a rewriting of Gogol’s “The Nose,” while “Who Am I” plays on Alice in Wonderland. Ugrešić’s commentary on her own work escapes moralizing charges because of its knowing humor: she bites in both modes.
Consider, for instance, the eponymous story of the collection. The narrator has coffee with a writer-pal, Petar, who requests the use of one of the narrator’s characters “for coital purposes.” Alas, the only thing worse than bad sex is badly written sex. The narrator and Petar get enmeshed in a sticky situationship that begins with the narrator’s tears for her own character: “I’m crying for all the female characters in the world! I’m crying generally, literary-historically, and globally, don’t you understand?” These tears are thick with Ugrešić’s trademark irony. In “De l’horrible danger de la lecture,” her new afterword, Ugrešić confesses “that this story has its ‘feminist’ side readers from other literary backgrounds may find a bit old-fashioned”—as if Ugrešić believes that misogyny is only a problem in Croatia. Ugrešić’s feminism is always post-national and also highly intertextual; in the afterword, she also glosses the format of the story as a riff on the Yugo writer’s manual How to Become a Writer by Petar Mitić.
At the end of “De l’horrible danger de la lecture,” Ugrešić tries to justify the inclusion of “Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button,” a recently written flash fiction about dislocation and tailoring, in a republished collection of her old material. She plays ingénue literary detective: poring over her old work she is surprised to find mention of buttons across different decades and genres. Button-collection turns into a virtuosic meta-literary reflection on craft that spans Yugo rock and emoji culture. The last words we get from this late great artist are not her own. She ends with a quotation from a short story by Yugo-Czech writer V.B. Borjen: “How did I find myself in this story?” Quotation is a generous and generative act. Like intertextuality, it creates a broader literary universe, a community where there was not one before.