Hum (Jan 2012)
EXISTENTIAL ANGST OF FATIMA OSMANAGIC
Abstract
Andric’s novel The Bridge on the Drina gives concluding remarks and it synthesizes the genesis of the legend and legendary figures of Bosnian past, from its first story of the epic hero Alija Djerzelez to a balladesque fate of wise and beautiful Fatima Osmanagic. Structurally, a beauty of a woman is set as the counterpart of the bridge; on one hand, it is a solid stone edifice that is a symbol of permanent beauty, on the other hand, it is a fragile beauty of a woman, which has its time and duration only in art. Literary criticism interprets that a girl in her defiance throws herself into the river. However, the “pride is a key motive for the girl’s tragedy, which is understandable in the patriarchal culture and aesthetic sensibility of the closed Muslim family and the ballad genre. Her tragic guilt is in that she has some inner reason to tempt fate by rejecting a young man to whom she will be given as a bride with her father’s approval and thus found herself in a stalemate of a tragic situation. She will resolve the existential bloody knot by jumping off the bridge on her wedding way after the ceremony and, therefore, she will redeem her father’s promise, but proud beauty will also keep her own word. Fate on a wedding way evokes a ballad in which a beautiful girl cannot go through her whole wedding day because her destiny will be fulfilled on that day. According to a balladesque matrix, inevitability of fate has to be accepted without a word or regret. In solitude, while watching the starry sky, in pantheistic experience of union of its own pulse and the rhythm of cosmic space of big world, peaceful and callous for chest pain and human suffering, becomes peaceful at the point of union of life and death. At the end, the romance of the story undermines the harsh reality, corpse of a drowned woman, Baudelairian end of earthly beauty.
