Ghostly Embodiments of Migration: Jarmila Očkayová’s Aesthetics of Estrangement and Transnationalism in L’essenziale è invisibile agli occhi

A strange sickness haunts the protagonist of Jarmila Očkayová’s L’essenziale è invisibile agli occhi (1997).¹ The novel uses this sickness as its central symbolic imagery for encoding the estranging effects of migration and addressing the protagonist’s psychic trauma. In the novel, accounts of various physical symptoms interrupt the narrative and impose themselves as moments of inarticulate rupture. The protagonist, whose name is Agata Jakub, is an Italo-Slovakian journalist who finds herself unable to grasp the source of her malattia. Yet, her anxious questioning leads her on a journey to recover her multiple belongings. She begins to recall not only her stunted formation as a woman, but also years of repression that hint at a need for reconciliation with the idea of a transnational self.²

In the novel, Očkayová dislocates the notion of national belonging, articulates a transnational ethos, and exposes the arbitrary nature of divisions that separate humans across borders. In this article, I examine the representation of the trauma of border crossing in Očkayová’s novel and her aesthetics of estrangement, which supports Victor Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie. I also refer to Cathy Caruth’s work on trauma to argue that Očkayová configures the experience of crossing the border between Italy and Slovakia as a trauma that resists naming and that lives on in the body as a trace memory. Finally, through references to Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, I intend to reveal that Očkayová transforms the potentially deformative experience of crossing national borders and exilic migration into a positive one.

Although a work of fiction, L’essenziale è invisibile agli occhi incorporates traces of both Očkayová’s life in Slovakia and her own migration to Italy. Born in Slovakia in 1955, Očkayová emigrated to Italy in 1974 to study Italian literature at the University of Bologna. She currently lives in Reggio Emilia where she works as a writer and translator. Očkayová first left Bratislava during the 1970s. At the time, the region that now comprises Slovakia enjoyed relative economic stability due to its high level of industrialization and what Tomas Frejka calls “the peculiar sociopolitical situation of stabilization” after the Prague Spring of 1968.³ “Normalization” after the short-lived Prague Spring, however, entailed thoroughgoing political repression and the return to stifling ideological conformity. Today Slovakia enjoys one of the strongest economies of the former Soviet satellite countries, on par with Hungary and Poland, which are all conceived by Italians and other Western Europeans as Central European rather than Eastern European, and therefore, less other.⁴ Despite Slovakia’s extensive industrialization, many still envision it as somehow intrinsically backwards.⁵ Slovakian identity, from the Western perspective, remains colored by forty years under Soviet rule, despite Slovakia’s efforts to rise from the ashes of the Cold-War era and rejoin “Europe,” which technically happened in 1993. In contrast to Slovakia, which maintains strong ties to its rural past that figure significantly in its identity, Italy after the Second World War attempted to erase its rural past in an effort to “re-color” Italian identity and establish itself as a First-World nation.⁶ Očkayová’s discourse on multiple belongings thus blends two very different experiences of Europe. It emphasizes, as we shall see, a transnational identity that moves beyond the nationalist beliefs that have traditionally polarized Europe.

Stranger in a Strange Land: The Aesthetics of Estrangement

L’essenziale è invisibile agli occhi traces the belated coming-of-age story of Agata Jakub, a Slovakian-Italian recently separated from her husband, a native Italian politician named Angelo. The novel is divided into three sections that gradually reveal the evolution of Agata’s perception of reality. In the first section of the novel, Očkayová explores the protagonist’s recent marital separation. Despite various prior trips to Bratislava, it is the dissolution of Agata’s marriage that triggers long-repressed memories of her emigration to Italy. As Agata attempts to create a new life for herself, she experiences a series...