Romantic Piers of The Bridge on the Drina

Ivo Andrić's The Bridge on the Drina has been one of the most controversial novels. This is partly due to its ethno-religious overtones. The novel has received an extensive amount of literary criticism. "The Serbian Academy's 1974 bibliography of works by and on Andrić lists well over twelve hundred critical items dating from 1914 and stretching to the early seventies."¹ Critical viewpoints on the work have been diverse. Mujeeb R. Khan sees The Bridge on the Drina as a novel that discloses Andrić's way of expressing discontent with Ottoman rule, the one time imperial power of the region.² Nicholas Moravcevich, on the other hand, analyzed "the epic quality of Andrić's work by examining his concept of temporality."³ For him the epic is constructed around

… two objects: the bridge and the river, forever linked in time. In addition to their tangible existence, both bridge and river are endowed with a symbolic, archetypal significance. As a product of human toil that resulted in a perfect blend of utility and beauty, the first epitomizes the permanence of man's artistic endeavor, while the second, being a perennially renewed, infinitely variable force of nature, symbolizes the perpetuity of its great law of change.⁴

In this sense, The Bridge on the Drina reveals a major and repetitive conflict in human life, one that is between stability and change. E. D. Goy reads the novel as a miniature account of history in which "[the] stories and incidents … represent the constant process of existence. History does not alter anything but the superficial form of life. There is no development, only the cycle of good and evil, light and darkness, expressed in different ways."⁵ Henry R. Cooper, alternatively, approaches the work from a different perspective, studying the structure of its composition rather than examining the social and political motives harboured in it. He argues that a structural analysis of the novel should be a way of viewing the novel "as a conglomeration of episodes bound together by the single motif of the bridge, a symbol of permanence in a world of change," dividing the structure of the novel into three areas of "organizational principles," namely "the principle of time,"⁶ "characterization,"⁷ and "perception."⁸

In addition to a consideration of literary criticism of Andrić's work, this paper opens up a novel perspective and examines The Bridge on the Drina through a Romantic lens, highlighting, in the work, principles and elements of Romanticism such as Romantic admiration of childhood, the use of oriental tales and legends, country descriptions, imagination, memory, and the reconciliation of discordant qualities. The revealed Romantic qualities of The Bridge on the Drina provide another sphere for the work's "limitless" life which "burst[s] open into infinity" making it a classic transcending time.⁹ As of the Romantic qualities in The Bridge on the Drina there has been no study so far. This paper may set the stage for further discussions of the topic.

One of the Romantic qualities of the novel is Andrić's use of the childhood phase of life and the world, what Reba N. Soffer terms the "idealization of children that lamented the adult's loss of innocence, nobility, affinities with nature, and capacities with joy" and imagination.¹⁰ Through the use of images of children and their enjoyment, Andrić not only colors his narrative, but allows his readers to see life through the eyes of children. English Romantic poets used the child's character and child's vision of life to emphasize the loss of purity, innocence, peace, and comfort in a world created by adults during the time of the Industrial and French Revolutions as well as during the time of great social and political upheavals in Britain. The initiators of Romantic principles in England commonly placed a special emphasis on "childhood" as the purest phase of human life. "The Child is father of the Man" wrote William Wordsworth in his poem "My Heart Leaps Up."¹¹ Similarly, William Blake's poems such as "Holy Thursday," "The Chimney Sweeper," "The Little...