UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

16-18th February 2006

Friday 17 February 10:00 – 11:30: Panel D4: Identity in Literature

Sonja Koroliov (University of Halle/Wittenberg): ‘"They are us": death, memory, and the inclusion of the outsider in contemporary Macedonian short prose’

A considerable portion of the short prose published in Macedonia between 1980 and today centres on the topos of the outsider. In my paper, I would like to look at a number of texts by authors coming from very different ends of the literary spectrum: Vase Mančev, Kim Mehmeti, Ferid Muhić, Jadranka Vladova, Simon Drakul and others (selection to be finalized).

The many different treatments of the subject, not all overtly concerned with issues of nationality or ethnicity, offer interesting insights into the ways in which the representation of outsiders is relevant to the questions about ethnic, cultural, communal, tribal/familial or cultural identity discussed in these texts. I would like to start with a number of basic aspects (e.g.: What kinds of communities are at the centre of these stories? What types of outsiders are introduced, and in what way is the meaning of "being an outsider" constituted in each textual instance?), then going on to analyse the widely employed figure of the inclusion of the outsider through the acceptance of a death ritual and the establishment of a memory tradition.

It is interesting to see that although the constellations chosen are very varied, ranging from classical topoi (the handicapped wise man, the femme fatale etc.) to rather phantastic or surreal outsider groups, and although the societies depicted mirror Macedonian reality in that they include very rural and archaic as well as modern and urban communities, it is a feature shared by many texts that the plot is made to turn on the reappraisal and final inclusion of the outsider, with the storyline developed in a way rather similar to the peripeteiai of ancient tragedy. (Further similarities arise from the fact that, as in tragedy, the individual human fate is not seen in isolation, but rather in its relevance to the self-definition, founding myths and cultural recognizability of the community involved.)

Death is very important in this context: the representation of death as a natural disappearance of living beings, traditions, relationships etc. through the peaceful passing of time, the change of generations and the unwinding of the "chain of existence", present in the background of most of the texts, is set against a depicition of death as violation, disruption and the radical questioning of essential values, and it is this latter image of death that most often informs a community’s grasp of its own identity, however defined.

It is also important to set out the different variants of closure: The conflict is not always resolved – next to the inclusion of the outsider resulting in development, progress and greater completeness for the original community, there are also patterns of replacement – the "outsiders" replace the "insiders", revealing the illusionary nature of their original "insider" self-perception or even questioning notions of social or cultural stability altogether.

Set against a background of unresolved cultural conflict, contemporary Macedonian literature is thus experimenting with identities beyond the firm ground of stability, harmony or homogeneity, deviating from older European models and searching for solutions based on an acceptance of the specific nature of the country’s history and present situation.