No story of resistance is a story of defeat

New novel Saša Ilić Rt takes place in three war years - 1942, 1992 and 2022 - and unites them, as a place of action (or a place of obsession), mountain Rtanj. Each of these times is marked by violence against both people and nature: the mountain is destroyed for ores, gold, myths, and greed and stupidity unstoppably cause damage until they are met with resistance. Stories are told by people, of course, but there is also a wise donkey-witness, who explains how things are and, unencumbered by human suffering, human evil and human stupidity, uses his time to see better and more.

Five years after Nino's award for the novel Dog and counter-bass, Saša Ilić publishes a novel in which he retains the recognizable features of his writing, but also introduces elements that were not present in his previous texts. Ilić is also an engaged intellectual (isn't that a pleonasm?), which is why we start the conversation from the present moment.

photo: atdhe mulla

"WEATHER" The company is working., and the topic of conversation is your new novel. Is it appropriate to talk about art while, simultaneously, is waging a fierce struggle against a dictatorship that is intensifying its violence?

SASA ILIC: You are right, we are in a crisis political moment. But as far as society is concerned, it is located in fermentation new organization, to say the least new birth. It is counterbalanced by the political crisis. A new political culture has yet to be born from this one social ferment. And it happens at every moment, at all the points where we recognize the contours rebellious society. This is the society that interests me as a writer and I wrote about it in the novel Rt. It should be remembered that artists have always been in a state of rebellion, that is, a strike, so this moment is their "natural state". The reactionary part of society has retreated into its lagoons, academies, captive institutions from which only the gnashing of teeth or the repetition of government platitudes can be heard. Calls to arrest the rector or to "beat the kidneys with a baton" to rebellious students and citizens. To work or not to work in such conditions is a question, first of all, for all those productive parts of society, which did not have a direct connection with the public, which they now finally achieve through pubuna on the street. Aspiring artists must continue to fight on their stage. After all, the legacy of the partisan struggle in Yugoslavia teaches us that all forms of art were important in the struggle. We recently had a retrospective of Đorđe Andrejević Kun's art in Belgrade. We had a reprint of Goranova Jame. In the archives, we can find manuscripts, printing prints of the rebel press, testimonies about performances under the open sky. Therefore, I find that the subversive performances in the theaters in the past months were more effective than the actors walking through the streets of Belgrade. Of course, this applies to the rebellious part of society in the conditions of turbulent transformation, which is in front of our eyes every day. It is important to talk about it. It is important to bear witness. Being part of the "rebellion against the machinery".

Why would there be a rebellion?, as you say, the natural state of the artist?

There is no such thing as a democratic and just society, a society that, with its abundance of fairness, equality and solidarity, suspends all desires for change or correction of the given order. I am convinced that there is no imagined place in the future, just as there is no predetermined transition such as, for example, the one proclaimed in the former Eastern and Southeastern Europe, where the transition from communism, i.e. socialism, to a Western-type democracy took place. The crisis of Western democracy assures us of that. The path of political transition is an unknown, just like writing a novel is an unknown. When you start from an idea, towards a goal that was projected at the beginning, you don't know where that place is, you just feel that you are on the right track while writing. Whether you find a good path is a matter of your talent and intuition. There is a web of social and canonical consensus around you, and you have to transcend them if you think you're going to reach your goal. In that volume exceeding I see an artistic rebellion. And it can be found in literary texts from Baudelaire to our days. On the other hand, in rebellious society is the most strongly expressed desire to exceed. I am reminded of the Paris Commune, which Svetozar Marković, a contemporary of hers, saw as a "rebellion against the monarchist machinery” in a captive republic. Not by chance, a term machinery it has grown to be key to describing what we are fighting in the streets today. In front of RTS. In the cities of Serbia.

Perhaps the subtitle of your novel could be: one mountain and three stories. How would you summarize the idea of ​​the novel Rt?

Rt is a novel about the split between nature and society, that is, about the struggle of a part of society to re-establish that lost connection. In order to be able to describe that rather dramatic phenomenon, I had to give up the linear story and one hero, i.e. leave the territory of the expected and try to tell the story of the fate of a mountain, in this case Rtnja, which is at the center of this struggle. That's why I used the dramatic unity of the place that sums up three times - three war summers in 1942, 1992 and 2022. I thereby intensified the dramatic potential of the action that brings the story of this unequal struggle in each of those time streams. Additional dynamism is brought by the Bukvić family, whose members become actors in the drama of our time, which is marked by the raid of corporate companies on critical mineral raw materials. All this takes place on the periphery of the European Union.

Yet, Isn't your novel par excellence political? On one of the important levels, of course, the novel warns about the destruction of nature as a problem, but that is a political issue. After all, you are a distinctly political writer.

My novel is par excellence poetic, and political in my text arises from the new order of language that I have built in it. That language stands in contrast to the language of politics. That is why everyone will read it as literature, that is, as a story about people in a time of disintegration of the original connection between nature and man. I found an important starting point in Andrić's narrative text Jelena, missing woman, which I read as unstable covalent bond between man and the energy of nature. I came to this angle of reading during my stay in Geneva, where Andrić began his journey towards Nature, which he reached through his fascination with Spinoza, after a trip to Weimar. This topic will permanently interest him and he will return to it later, after arriving in Sokobanja and climbing Rtanj. Today, this story seems to me to be Andrić's most important text, a cryptic Bequest that requires a new reading in the time of the general conquest of critical minerals by mining companies, primarily in lithium mining all over the world, including in Serbia. Walking after Jelena, i.e. after Nature, is the poetic path of transformation that marked my novel Rt.

Three dates intertwine in the time vertical of your novel and they are clearly connected. How do you respond to Marx's famous insight that history once appears as a tragedy, and the second time as a farce?

Rt is a novel about climbing a mountain. In three times of war. Three social orders that have in common the lack of institutions. In those times, people's self-organization is necessary. Although the novel has the characteristics of a tragic plot, it is not actually a tragedy, because in it the catharsis is not due to the manifestation of death, but to the principle of hope. He follows the fate of the resistance movement in Yugoslavia, during its disintegration and today, in the limited zones of resistance to world corporations. The characteristic of each of the narrative flows is learning about different forms of resistance: the Yugoslav one arises from the results of the Spanish Civil War, the current one grows out of the legacy of the Yugoslav revolution. From the fragments that are collected again and incorporated into something new. That's why I wrote the novel under a working title Resistance, although I knew I wouldn't publish it under that title. Over time, I realized that there is a common denominator between that working title and the place where the action takes place - the mountain Rtanj, two letters that remind us of the chemical element that the heroes of my novel are fighting for. And that is the "Cape", which, in addition to denoting the protruding free part of the land, is also a symbol for Freedom - critical mineral which we sorely miss.

photo: Vesna Lalić

In this novel, you change narrative registers more decisively than in any previous one. What different language registers bring you?

There are three glosses in the novel, three geological-poetic records of one of the heroes - engineer Budimir Bukvić. In them I tried to describe the geological layers of the mountain, but also to express poetic reflections on the novel. If you delve a little deeper into them, you will see that I was interested in the phenomena of light and the structure of stone, which are disturbed by the destructive action of man. Therefore, I tried to depict the structure of the stone, that is, the mountain, in the novel. And it is made up of many different parts that fit into the complex structure of the language like the crystal lattices of dolomite or sandstone. The bearers of those elements are the heroes of the novel Rt. In order to achieve different nuances in those structures, in those poetic grids Rta, I resorted to different language registers, which I achieved by getting closer to the inner perspective of each of the heroes individually: Majra, Milan, Svetlana, Andrić, Jelena, Pavlo Minho, little Magda or the donkey Lungi, who represents the philosophical bond between society and the mountain. I came to this idea gradually, during the long research that preceded the actual writing.

The donkey Lungi is, therefore, commentator ( "philosopher"). On a symbolic level, its role is clear. What kind, however, plays a role on a poetic level?

I needed a literary hero who could tell the story of 1992. I could not entrust that to engineer Bukvic, whose fate is tied to that year, or to anyone else. I needed it there will be a transition, between nature and society, which does not belong to either world until the end, which is separate and questioned over the fate of the world. And no one is more so than donkeys. I found the first indications in the documents about the Minho, that is, about the construction of the chapel on top of Rtnje, the biggest burden of which was borne by these animals. Many were killed in the process. It's long the last one an offshoot of its kind in that region. It summarizes the story of the endangerment of nature and the dominance of the spirit over the brutality of society. In a philosophical sense, he is a descendant of the Presocratics who listens to nature, the cosmos, goes down into caves, observes the mating of butterflies, observes the inactions of people, thinks about the lost foundations of life. In a poetic sense, Lungi is a medium that narrates stories for adult but sensitive, he is a despised being who gains his authority by mastering the space of solitude. In political terms, he's an ass who broke away from Banksy's graffiti.

Spirit domination, you say, over the cruelty of society. Allow a polemical note.: There is no spirit in your novel., than destruction. Lungi sees and understands., but he can't do anything because he's an ass. There are wonderful and brave heroes., but don't they experience defeat?

No story of resistance is a story of defeat. Donkey stubbornness and stopping the political machinery on its way to death is one such story of resistance. Lungi's recognition of his relatives in the human species, above all among poets such as Branko Ćopić, whose verses from Songs of the Dead Proletarians meditates on his ascent to Rtanj, opens the way of hope that in the future, as the poet said, come a new youth and continue our unsung songs, forged in live fire. This is exactly what happens in the final episode Rta, when little Magda tries her own free solo from the old ruadr shaft in Coober Pedy. We witness such things ourselves these days as we join the student protest, which has filled the place in us where fear resided with the desire for justice. It is no coincidence that on social networks we often listen to clips in which the murdered Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić talks about freeing the captured state from the criminal cartel. Even more far-reaching is the message of the "defeated" Paris Commune, which lasted from March 18 to May 28, 1871. Its organization of free municipalities, the introduction of replaceable judges, the equalization of daily wages with workers' wages, the fair distribution of food, the abolition of the guillotine and the introduction of workers' self-management represent ideals that have inspired people all over the world for more than 150 years. And the then leader of the machinery, Louis Adolphe Thiers, thundered that he would have no mercy and that he would destroy the Communards everywhere in the world! But he did not succeed, because the libertarian idea continued to live until our days and is now spreading through choirs that are organized throughout Serbia. It will have a decisive influence on some future elections.

How much time do you need to "move away" from the novel you finished? What drives you to write?? Milenko Bodirogić recently said that he thinks he won't write anymore after his new novel. But that's what he thought even after the first one.

I have been writing and publishing for five years. It takes me so long to get away from the previous story. Although it happens that during the writing of a novel I start research for a future one. So it happened that in 2017, two years before publication Double bass, during treatment in Sokobanja, realized that I had found a story for a future novel. That's when I started the research that I completed in Switzerland, where I wrote the novel Rt.