An Anthology of Croatian Literature

Goran Tribuson (1948- )

Goran Tribuson (1948– ) A native of Bjelovar, a small town northeast of Zagreb in Slavonia, Tribuson has produced numerous novels, short stories, and essays over the past thirty years. He has an eye for the absurd and a healthy sense of humor. The following excerpt from his 1988 novel Povijest pornografije (The History of Pornography) is taken from Books from Yugoslavia 1 (1989): 70–72. The translator is not listed; the translation has been emended for publication here.
296 An Anthology of Croatian Literature The History of Pornography: VIII I never did really understand when exactly we took the wrong path. Was it when we began to go to detective and Western films deemed educationally unsuitable, or when we began to listen to Presley, who was considered the decayed West’s attack against socialist morality (while at the same time the partisans of the true American spirit called him a greasy-haired communist)? Did our moral decadence come in the wake of long hair and jeans, or much earlier, with the arrival of chewing gum? Did the opening of the national borders and generous distribution of passports turn us into simian imitators of the West, or would closed frontiers have turned us into freaks of an even worse kind? Did we move from the age of blissful enthusiasm to the age of scepsis because of some broader, global, social tendencies, or only because we were growing up? My father, Franyo, constituted a particularly strange example both in the moral-pedagogical and the ideological sense. I am not sure if his behavior is particularly telling when it comes to understanding a turning point in time, but the understanding of my personal destiny is almost inseparable from his views, or the whims he considered to be his views. In 1945, as a man become suddenly and slightly unexpectedly an aware communist, he devoted himself body and soul to the cause of general progress . At that time, as I can figure it from my father’s words, progress was a very simple and clear category: everything that was old needed to be eradicated and replaced by the new. This operation started to cause problems later with the emergence of some strange views that not all old things were bad, and that the new did not have to be necessarily good. Working for the cause of progress presumed the finding of a suitable paragon and inspiration. Like the rest of his generation, my father found his principal paragon model in the East, i.e., the Soviet Union. The good but also embarrassing evidence of this was a name which I managed (thank God) to avoid by pure chance. In 1948, when the sudden break off from the great and glorious source of inspiration took place, my father’s russophobia was sometimes excessive. When the relations with the Soviet Union became, at least seemingly, normal again in the mid-fifties, Father’s sorrow was only partly mitigated by the fact that the border area by the Drava river would become a better and more normal place for Sunday fishing. One would think that his bitter and disconsolate disillusionment with the Russians would make Father more tolerant towards my benign americanophilia deriving at the time from rock, fashions, and similar nonsense. My foot! In Presley he saw destructive Western influence, chewing gum and jeans were decadent capitalist products launched by the CIA, Western and whodunit films meant to him the revival of perverse bourgeois morality or rather amorality, and so on and so forth. You may think that he wanted Goran Tribuson 297 to be his own self, free of all spiritual and material imports from East or West. But no—he was happy when he bought an East German television set, and even happier when he bought a West German one. He felt very well in the Italian shirt and Austrian shoes that Mother brought from a trip organized by the Teachers’ Union in 1965. He liked Russian romances (Eastern bloc) and Italian canzoni (NATO) but threw in remonstrance Uncle’s fur cap into the fire (Warsaw Pact) and with equal remonstrance switched off the radio when I listened to Buddy Holly (CIA). A detailed analysis of all these gestures might show that by feigning ideological stands he was disguising his feeling of being lost in a neurotic cold-warring world, but my father Franyo would only wipe his ass with such an...