Kraj povijesti i hrvatski novopovijesni roman

Abstract

The article examines the presence of postmodernist ideas concerning the end of history (as the end of the grand narrative about human events understood as evolution towards the liberation of man) within Croatian literature and culture in recent decades. The “end of history” in Eastern Europe is often connected to the fall of the Iron curtain, so that anthropologists, referring to Lyotard, speak of “the post-socialist condition” (see Prica 2006: 10). It is important to point out, however, that the dissolution of the metanarrative about socialism in Yugoslav society began before the actual dissolution of the state of Yugoslavia (Feldman Čale and Prica 2006, Kuvačić and Flego 1988). While noting that the dissolution of the grand narrative started before and continued after the fall of the Wall, it should be specified that in the nineties in Croatia circumstances of war led to numerous and explicit statements by writers and literary critics about the need to maintain – or to re-introduce – a discourse on history (primarily in the sense of national history) as a grand narrative. Nevertheless, the documentary and autobiographical literature that proliferated in the early nineties, as well as the prose concerning actuality, produced in the second half of the decade (the so-called stvarnosna proza), demonstrates the opposite tendencies, i.e. the disillusionment, scepticism and absence of great ideologies of liberation. The article examines the Croatian historical (or neo-historical) novel of the last three decades in particular. We take into consideration the critical works that defined it as historiographic metafiction, according to Linda Hutcheon (Nemec 1996), and we analyse in particular the novel Triemeron(2002) by Nedjeljko Fabrio, in which we can find clear postmodern characteristics in the constructivist idea of history and in substantial pessimism – with no progressive or liberatory visions – about the passing of time and the repetition of violence. With regard to the narrator of Fabrio’s novel, however, it should be pointed out that its integrity, the demiurgic self-confidence that dominates the world of the novel and especially its manipulative power aimed at establishing a desirable harmony with the political and ethical beliefs of the reader (in particular regarding the thorny issue of Croatian war crimes during the nineties), link him to the modern (rather than postmodern) concept of the nation. The subversive effect of the grand narrative when it reappears in postmodern discourses is subsequently shown as a risk hidden in the same theoretical dis-course about historiographic metafiction to which some critics reject the request for a reconstruction of the historical particularity of the narrating subject, especially in the case of the story about traumatic experiences (Jukić 2003, Biti 2003). In regard to the narrative elaboration of traumatic experiences, the article examines the novel Trieste(original title Sonnenschein, 2007) by Daša Drndić. Typically postmod-ern in its narrative procedures, it nevertheless shows, especially when requesting a profound examination of the European conscience after Nazi crimes, a presence of strong moral authority, justified by the argument, but devoid of the consciousness of its own contingency and also dangerously close to the genetic theory when dealing with the issue of the guilt of the second generation. That means that, unexpectedly, in this postmodern novel we witness once again the return of the grand narrative.