Language does not speak, language speaks

Without the greater risk of misunderstanding the meaning, or without the particular fear that it is an exaggeration, it can be said that for the interpretation of Svetislav Basara's literature, it is necessary to invent new theoretical tools, a new literary-theoretical language, a language that would be a counterpart to the language that was invented by Basara in his mature (third) writing phase, just as, after all, reading Svetislav Basara requires an extraordinary reading experience. Not a few experienced readers broke their teeth trying to digest Basara's mature novels. Because Basara not only invents a new literary expression - which usually brings writers a high place within the language in which they write; here is Andrić, for example, or Mirko Kovač - he attacks the very tongue from which it springs, he injures it and he heals it, he rips its guts and dismembers it, in order to turn the dismembered tongue into a shining monster that some are horrified by, while others admire. It is on this hard see-saw between horror and admiration that the difference between Basara and, probably, all other writers on to this language. It is difficult to feel anything other than admiration for Andrić's language and his literature, and only scumbags are angry at Andrić - which is easily verifiable - who, after all, don't even care about Andrić. (Let's just look at how Basara's characters lash out at Andrić; at Andrić, not at his literature.) Only those who can't read are angry at Andrić. And Basara angers all kinds of people, great readers and naive readers, experienced readers and those who, due to inexperience, do not manage easily, he angers the older ones who do not forgive him for the erotic adventures of St. Desanke Maksimović and the younger ones who don't understand anything and who confuse the characters of Milovan and Dragan Đilas (for example), not to mention subtle allusions, irony and hidden meanings, anger Basar those who recognize in his language nothing but vulgar coachman's vocabulary and, above all, it deeply disappoints those who in no way manage to find a story in his texts (Let's say right away: they don't find a story because there is no story.). It is hardly necessary to say that admiration is met with equal indiscriminateness. However, Basara does not write for everyone, and for him, that cunning Nietzsche's dedication from Zarathustra: a book for everyone and no one. Basara writes for readers ready to embark on a reading adventure without certain outcomes because, let's add, there is no more uncompromising writer on to this language: Basara's novels are perfectly untranslatable, and is there any writer who hasn't thought how nice it would be if it were read in English, French, Russian... Of course, it is less important what the critics think about Basara's work, although it is quite amusing that patriotic criticism, always vigilant in the face of those who attack all of Serbia and its surroundings - and Basara mostly does this - somehow shriveled and fell silent in front of his autochauvinistic, autogenocidal and generally non-Serbian (cross out non-Serbian, write anti-Serbian) pagan language.

...

MINORITY REPORT

What, then, is Basara's new novel about, whose untranslatable title could perhaps read "minority report" - with a clear reference to Steven Spielberg's 2002 film - or "deficient report", or even "superfluous report”? This question is difficult to answer because, it has been said, there is no story in Basara, only swirling language that bites itself by the tail (self-referentiality), just the perfect rhythm of language (there are simply no excesses in Basara), hilarious wit that tries not to overflow into vulgarity, and the accompanying irony. However, the fact that there is no story does not mean that there is no meaning, only that the meaning, like a kebab wrapped in bacon, is most often mediated by irony, language play, "impossible" reference (to St. Desanka, for example, Heidegger or the local priest Joc), displaced , therefore, from its explicit mold (because without these deposits of mediation, Basara's text would not be literature). Having finally laid to rest Desimir Stojković, the great painter, adventurer, scoundrel, pro-life, money-lover, misanthrope, erotomaniac in self-imposed celibacy, high-moral amoralist who accompanied him in his last few novels - Stojković, therefore, died on the third attempt, but Basara, in the character of Kaloperović, he does not give peace (or Stojković does not give peace to Basara) - for Kaloperović (cross out Kaloperović, write Basara, in the new novel those two lika they mix anyway) a handsome new interlocutor, Ogrisković, descendant of an aristocratic line of Vojvodina Serbs, rich, racist, erotomaniac in self-imposed celibacy, amoral and obsessive almost as much as Stojković, but Ogrisković's obsession is bound (like hydrogen atoms to an oxygen atom) to people who are communist regime, after the Second World War, forcibly moved from Herzegovina to Vojvodina, therefore, for the so-called colonists that Ogrisković, not at all politically correct, he calls Glamočani. Ogrisković's main problem is that Serbia, when it had the opportunity, occupied Vojvodina, so to speak, and not only that, by the force of political unity, it spoiled the godly customs of the Vojvodina Serbs shaped by Austro-Hungarian influence and the beautiful, baroque Serbian language that the Vojvodina Serbs carefully nurtured - Serbs from Serbia without provinces "populated" the Serbian language, claims Ogrisković - but the communist government, in order to harm the Vojvodina Serbs, settled The people of Glamo where they do not belong, and they, the people of Glamo, not that they are not colonists, but, according to Ogrisković's reasoning, they are colonizers: they colonized the territory, they colonized the language, they colonized, finally, the culture of the Vojvodina Serbs, but as they were not up to it and they didn't know what to do with it, with that culture, they simply destroyed it by introducing their own mountain customs. When the matter is "retold" like this, won't the heart of every "real" Serb jump with excitement because Ogrisković succinctly and brutally articulates everything that a "real" Serb, famous for his partial knowledge of history (by which he, of course, self-fanatizes himself), thinks and says: don't they prove Ogrisković's views obviousness that Yugoslavia was a Comintern, Vatican and Belorussian conspiracy against the Serbs and their culture, with the slight remark that the unification with Vojvodina actually happened "naturally", due to the centuries-old aspiration of the Serbs to find themselves in one state (which, however, must not be called Yugoslavia than Serbia). Therefore, in addition to the writer's alter-ego, the indomitable Kaloperović, and Ogrisković, the "Vojvodina talks" in the "Bulin" tavern in the village of B. in the S-ska gubernia are also attended by a certain Prokić, a Belgrade intellectual and dramatist, the voice of reason in Ogrisković's unstoppable monologues in which, among other things, he constantly criticizes Kaloperović. Ogrisković will also touch on Đinđić and his murder, as well as some of his other obsessions, but for the rest language and other events the reader will have to read at his own risk.

LANGUAGE IS A DOG

This is how things are in the first part of the novel titled Slow burn. In the second part, titled Burnout, the scene moves from the village of B. in Srem to Belgrade, where Kaloperović, upon hearing the news of the death of David Albahari and Goran Petrović, leaves Banovo Brdo for their funerals, at an air temperature of almost 40 degrees. If it is difficult to "retell" what happens in the first part of the novel (if there is no story, there is no retelling), it is even more difficult to say anything about the events of the second part. Concisely and without any illusion that it is possible to convey even a part of the atmosphere, Kaloperović at the New Cemetery, probably under the influence of a merciless star, begins to act just crazy and while waiting for Albahari's funeral to begin - he arrived at the cemetery two hours before, just in case scheduled cremations (it should be emphasized that, according to his own words, he liked the cremation very much) - he first visits Đinđić's grave, and then Andrić's, around which, from unknown reasons, makes circles (more than sixty). All this happens while the sun is burning, associations are bubbling in jets, and a certain Popović (Beba?) is calling him on the phone every hour. In addition, he meets half-naked or perfectly dressed women at the graves, which he is not sure if they are representations or real. Right after Albahari's cremation, in the tavern "Božur" next to the cemetery, to his own astonishment he met the extremely attractive Monica La Roy la Dury, no less than the daughter of his guru Desimir Stojković, whom, deceived by Stojković's self-imposed celibacy, he did not even know existed . The daughter is naturally very similar to her father, barking, brutal, incorrect, but she is also specific in that, giving up men (just as her father gave up women), she sewed up her genitals (how she solved the problem of the urethra, the reader will find out for himself, just as he will have to find out for himself what all this has to do with the first part and Ogrisković).

Finally, the grand final titled Recycle Bin offers a dramatic situation through dialogues in which, above all, Zoran Đinđić participates.

"Metaphors", wrote Svetislav Basara, "belong to that multitude that brings me to despair when writing". Basara deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all meaning, just like all signification. Minority Report is the opposite of a metaphor: there is no more literal or figurative meaning, there is only an arrangement of states on the array of words. One particular thing and other things are only intensities through which sounds or words pass, deterritorialized according to their lines of escape.

The previous paragraph is, so to speak, true, but not correct. The first sentence was not written by Basara, but by Kafka in to the diary from 1921. The continuation does not belong to the signatory of these lines (although he would like it to belong), but to Deleuze and Guattari from the book Kafka (translated by Slavica Miletić, pp. 38-39). Instead of the word "Basara", therefore, in Deleuze's and Guattari's book, "Kafka" is written, and instead Minority Report stands Transformation. Nevertheless, both Kafka and Deleuze & Guattari's words fit Basara perfectly. Because Basara is a magnificent intensity that does not exist in literature (Thomas Pynchon, for example - to stay with the comparison with writers - is a second-rate Basara). Basara's words, and often sentences, throw off the sheath of original or common meanings - as in the hilarious leitmotif "the peasants shouted" - leaving them to flutter like snake tongues without a snake (without a subject and without a metaphor), like Deleuze's organs without a body, as Alice in Wonderland remains without the smile that now floats freely without her. Basara (to once again call on Deleuze and Guattari for help) "extracts from language tonality without meaning". His words and his sentences "gamble for their own sake, bark and multiply, since they are the dogs of language" (p. 39). By the way, they can also bite. But if he first sucks the meanings out of his sentences by driving them out of the dens of intelligibility, he, since he has no choice, returns them to the language as pure intensities because there is no other language than the one in which he writes, just as, after all, neither do we. Basara's readers. That's why we have to take care of the meanings ourselves.