The Body of the Postmodernist Narrator: Between Violence and Artistry by Fatima Festić (review)

This is a curiously timely work, despite (or perhaps because of) being written more than a decade ago, in 1998, originally in Bosnian-Croatian and much later translated into English by the author herself. Referred to as “a small document-testimony to the last decade of the 20th century,” it offers, via an in-depth analysis of postmodern narrating, a novel look at postmodernism. Widely enough used (and misused and abused) paradigm or concept that may or may not have by now exhausted itself, postmodernism gains a different voice and weight in Fatima Festić’s consideration. Starting from Habermas’ claim about Holocaust as the marker of the end of modernism, Festić’s definition of postmodernism ties this concept to violence, murder and destruction, to “dark forces of desire and the repercussions of their externalization in the reality of life” (1). Based on the insights of psychoanalysis from Freud to Lacan to Žižek along with interpretations by Kristeva and Felman, The Body of the Postmodernist Narrator seeks to highlight the physio-biological element behind the self-referential impasse of (postmodern) literature via a tracing of the circulation of desires into narrative exchange, desires that can be seen as the products of the “drive to acquire knowledge” (3).

The novels to which interpretation, defined in The Body of the Postmodernist Narrator as a site for finding and elaborating opposition to “Lyotard’s…irreducible difference” between “one’s fiction and the piles of corpses” (196), is offered here—Christa Wolf’s Cassandra (1984), John Maxwell Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1987) and D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981)—are all canonical postmodernist novels. At the same time, they also occupy a variety of different borderlines that make them, in a sense, also marginal in postmodernism though not marginal for postmodernism. In her analysis of the novels, Festić employs a number of different theoretical foci (an emphasis on the interrelationship of visuality, consciousness and narration, the symbolic and representation and the referent and reference) that are all self-consciously and elaborately, indeed minutely, laid out for the reader. The basis of selection of the novels and, even more importantly, the frameworks of interpretation of Festić make her work an important statement not only on postmodernism but also on the state of comparative literature. At the same time, it also prompts the question of whether and in which manner the tendencies identified in the four novels are present in the world literature (a term that has recently regained popularity in the field of comparative literature) of the new millennium and if such presence would point toward continuity of (certain characteristics) of postmodernism or if the tendencies themselves may go, in fact, beyond the paradigm of postmodernism.

A few years after The Body of the Postmodernist Narrator was completed, Gayatri Spivak’s well-known statement on the situation of comparative literature, Death of a Discipline (2003), was published. It emphasized not only the need to recognize the state of crisis of the discipline but also envisioned new routes for it to take, routes that would yield a “responsible comparativism” that, when practiced thoroughly and with utter dedication may “come close to the irreducible work of translation…from body to ethical semiosis, that incessant shuttle that is a ‘life’” (Spivak 12-13). What is practiced in The Body of the Postmodernist Narrator is, similarly, a “responsible comparativism” that, via investigating “the split inherent in subject, agent and author” seeks to bring back to (postmodern) literature “the dimension of maturing and of (accepting) difference that today equals life itself” (Festić 4-5).

In different manner, each of the novels that form the interpretational nexus of Festić’s book deals with the question of history, violence, and trauma. The analysis of Cassandra foregrounds a re-writing of the myth of the Trojan War and the process of finding the alternative of living between killing and dying; the...