Kommentar von Drago Jančar
Kommentar von Drago Jančar
A piece of literature by the most prominent slovenian novelist, playwright and essayist Drago Jančar.
If, someday, your path should lead you to the Istrian coast, or more exactly to the little old town of Piran, or still more exactly, to the stony tip of the town that reaches far out into the sea, then be careful, in the evening, not to become lost in the illusion of the colours that are sprayed out by the sun sinking into the sea beneath the clouds.
Strain your eyes, and perhaps you will perceive, in the narrow crack between water and clouds, the shadows flitting about to and fro, flying towards you from the glowing sky across the bright surface of the sea, flying past way above your head and into the interior of the country, into its Alpine valleys and on to the other side, down towards the Pannonian plain. These are the melancholic daemons. You do not need to know them, you can be satisfied with tourist brochures that try to make you believe that you are “on the sunny side of the Alps”, in an old European country, in a country full of European prosperity, of the Baroque, good wines, and friendly and cheerful people.
Should you, however, see the shadows that fly cross the sky, cleverly avoiding the densely planted church towers on the hills, the mountains and the plains, then you should know that the actual home of the melancholy daemons is there. They live in the Alpine basin: in the morning they fly down to the sea, and at evening return to the highlands, they live in the crowns of the trees and on the mountain ranges, in village inns and on the Sunday streets in empty towns.
So empty on Sundays that the poet Tomaž Šalamun writes about them that there and in the countryside there is nothing, that was what his grandmother told him, when the poet was still a child and was boarding the train in Vienna. His grandmother had said: there is nothing in between, sleep until you get to Trieste, children, because there is nothing between Vienna and Trieste. Or only very minor things, as Milan Kundera says, Slovenia is so small, he writes that all the rivers only have one bank.
Who should be interested in such an area anyway, where the people like to put up with things, where they put up with their melancholic daemons and themselves, where they put up with everything from their earliest childhood to their very last day; and, to wit, quietly, and with a malicious Schadenfreude towards their own and others’ tolerance, where glasses are not smashed and jazz is not played, since acquiescence is not particularly joyful, yet nor is it particularly sorrowful, but rather something that one has to live with, because it is pre-determined. Even though the landscape is beautiful, the mountains are high, the hills are green, the wine is sweet and the sea is blue.
Yet anyone who has eyes to see knows only too well that this is also simply the illusion of the melancholy daemons. It is true that people here have always prayed to God for help, and as faithful sons and daughters of the Catholic Church they have built a little Baroque chapel on every hill and prayed to him there, that he might liberate them from the Turks, the Germans and the Italians, or even from the Protestants, whom they drove away to Germany, even though it was the Slovene preachers who gave them the first written texts in their own language, the Bible, which was published shortly after Luther's Bible, printing presses, numerous books, they drove them away and publicly burned their books. They expelled them and then celebrated them, just as they have always celebrated their deceased poets, always only once they were dead, they never liked the living ones.
They praised God and celebrated their dead, God above all because he had given them the beautiful landscape. Once upon a time, when he created the world, so it is recorded in a famous legend, once upon a time God had carefully distributed beauty equally all over the world, very economically and carefully, but in the end he still had a handful of beauty left over, so he scattered it across the country that today is called Slovenia.
People there have always liked to tell this tale. They like such legends, but one legend they do not like so much that was recorded for them by the writer Ivan Cankar at the start of the twentieth century, is the story of a visit of the Saviour: Our Saviour is wandering along the country road when he sees on a man sitting on a stone at the side of the road and weeping inconsolably. Whatever is the matter with you, asks our Saviour, who pities the man to the depths of his heart, why are you weeping? I am the Saviour, I can help you. The man raises his eyes, still wet with tears, and says: I am Slovene. The Saviour looks at him, and then sits down beside him and begins to weep bitterly too. If that is the case, says our Saviour, then not even I can help you. Not even your beautiful country can help you, because its beauty is an illusion for travellers. The more the inhabitants of this countryside stare at this illusion, the more they climb its high mountains and behold its yellow fields, the more they find themselves and others ugly and evil, themselves even more so then the others, and if they are not ugly and evil enough, then they do harm to themselves and others, so that they become so. People who write, and all kinds of artists, utter the word ‘desire’ with particular piety and explain to each other, full of pride, that no-one understands this word in all its profundity, and that this word cannot be translated into any other language, that this word is magic and that its ineffable nature can be understoo only by the inhabitants of this countryside.
Naturally, people here have done mischief and harm to others for ages, they have also chosen forms of society that best corresponded to their basic attitude to life, to mutual relations based on a deep melancholic maliciousness. Here oppressive systems have developed to great effect, here the wily and perfidious violence of clericalism was able to flourish, and at the first opportunity grew into the brutal criminality of a Communism that was particularly bestial from the outset. Here the political police achieved bafflingly good results, since they were able to hide behind the typical nature of the people, who only feel themselves to be in their most natural condition, deeply rooted in history and in their own nature, when they are able to do mischief to or slowly torment themselves and others, others and themselves.
Why would anyone be interested in such a country, even if, in passing through it, travellers praise the fact that in none of the town squares are riders with raised sabres to be found, but only poets, grammarians and librarians, why would anyone want to read the literature of this country, which tries to describe all this evil melancholy, at the same time also mocking it, because it believes that in this way it can tear it out, why would anyone at all want to read about the restlessness, about the blind restlessness of history, which the mad twentieth century, with its ideas of salvation, its armies and police, proclamations and ovations, sowed among the Slovenian people?
Anyone who writes from all this blind restlessness, who relates with joyful scorn for himself and for others about the people and daemons of this country, who provokes with his sentences and stories, both the people and the daemons, does not ask why he should explain to anyone else the secrets of this country, where the inhabitants would, after all, most like to dispose of their secrets, their memories, the dark melancholy concealed beneath their exultation, and even their language as quickly as possible. In order to able, as fast as possible, to practise free trade and to barter, in order to be just the same as the others, any others, whoever they may be, anything other than the way they actually are, with so many shadows flying around the village church towers and through the alleys of the empty Sunday towns, shadows that chase out over the surface of the sea, almost like buffoons and which you too, traveller, may be able to perceive on some evenings, in that bright crack on the horizon, in that red glow between the surface of the water and the clouds, if by chance, at that moment, you happen to be standing on the prow of the stone town, which looks like a ship made of stone that has long been waiting to sail off to somewhere else.