The Bridge (11 page)

She didn’t know where they were headed, but that made no difference. She was safe in the hands of her son and nothing bad could happen to her. She hadn’t had such a good time in ages.

They soon came out onto a boulevard lined with chestnut trees. The embanked side of a river stretched along one side. The young man turned off the pavement onto the sidewalk, under bushy treetops. Too bad there are so few people on the promenade, thought Miss Anita. It would look much more cheerful.

When they reached a stone bridge, the young man stopped the bicycle. He waited for her to get down and then got off too. He climbed up onto a wide parapet with a row of ornate lampposts on the outer side. First he lifted the bicycle up next to him, then put out his hand to help Miss Anita climb up.

She joined him without hesitation, although she had no idea what he intended to do. She watched him get on the bicycle, but didn’t respond immediately when he gestured for her to sit back on the bar. She leaned over a little and looked into the murky mass of the river with the flickering reflection of streetlights on its surface.

She raised her eyes to his smiling face, gazed at it for a while, smiled finally in return and got on the bar. He was now cycling slowly, formally, as though on parade. The lampposts they passed resembled a lineup of grenadiers.

They stopped in the middle of the bridge because something was blocking their way. He got off the bike, onto the parapet, and she did the same. He picked up the bicycle, held it over his head several moments, swung it and then let it go. She clapped as it curved downwards, hit the water with a splash and disappeared into the gloomy depths.

He bent down to pick up what was lying on the parapet. First he took the raincoat and held it out for her. It was a man’s, at least two sizes too big and with mismatched lapels, but this didn’t bother her in the slightest.

Then he handed her the scarf. She readily placed it around her neck, even though she didn’t like yellow. There were two large dark spots on one end that made it more attractive.

He dropped down on his left knee, right foot forward, slowly untied the laces of the white sneaker and took it off. Then he grabbed her right foot above the ankle, raised it a little, took off her shoe without unbuckling it and hurled it into the river.

When he had replaced her shoe with his sneaker and tied the lace, she discovered that it was neither too small nor too large. She did not find this strange. How natural, she thought, for a mother and son to have identical feet.

The shoe on her left foot ended up in the water too, but she received nothing in return. When he rose and stood next to her, they had one shoe each. The two shoes were side by side again, but the same person wasn’t wearing them.

He held out his hand. She took it and he bowed his head. She did the same and saw a boat starting to appear from under the bridge. It was magnificently lit and decorated with pennants, full of cheerful music and people waving at them.

When it got about halfway out, it stopped. The young man turned towards Miss Anita and smiled once again. She returned his smile, as she had at the beginning of the bridge. There was no need to say anything.

Their bare feet stepped forward in unison. They plummeted, but there was no danger. When they reached the deck, their landing on the sneakers would be as soft as down.

Slobodan Vladušić

A first reading of
The Bridge
leaves the impression of a pervasive Kafkaesque atmosphere that is hard to resist. I wonder, though, in Carver-like fashion: what do we really mean when we say Kafkaesque? There are as many enigmas of interpretation,
¹
perhaps, as there are enigmas of literary origin hidden behind this ordinary attribute.
²
Its purpose seems to be to subdue the enigma of a writer and his imaginary world in which the inconceivable and the alogical can never be vanquished.

If Živković’s book were just the echo of a world classic, this would be a recommendation to read it, but not necessarily interpret it. In line with the hermeneutics of questions and answers, we can ask ourselves the following: what question reappears on the contemporary reader’s horizon after the realization that Kafka’s answer may no longer 
be sufficient? In order to address this issue, we first need to answer another question: what is it that made Kafka part of the canon of world literature and of the broader cultural heritage such that his last name has become an attribute denoting a certain notion of the world?

We recall the influential study
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
in which Tzvetan Todorov centers the fantastic on the protagonist’s dilemma as to the nature of the events unfolding around him.
³
The protagonist wonders whether the events can be rationally explained or not, and it is this perplexity that enables the reader to identify with him.

In
The Trial
, such a definition of the fantastic is challenged, since Joseph K. shows no bewilderment and quickly accepts the presence of the Tribunal and the trial being conducted against him. The reader is thus unable to identify with the protagonist. At least not a reader who bases their understanding of the fantastic on the works analyzed by Tzvetan Todorov as primary examples of the fantastic. This seems to bear out Sava Damnjanov’s passing remark that Todorov has a 19th century understanding of the fantastic and is thereby dated.
⁴
In this respect, Todorov could be read as a theoretician of so-called “traditional” fantasy.

If Joseph K. consents too hastily to the trial being conducted against him, this haste indicates that any rational alternative to the fantastic has disappeared, although one still existed in the 19th century. Kafka places the source of the irrational in social institutions as the product of human rationality which, before him, had been the tacit foundation of the protagonist’s rationality as set against the (super)natural and otherworldly. When the irrational appears in a place where the rational used to reside, then the actions of Kafka’s protagonists are no longer strongholds of common sense and the reader’s refuge in a 
dubious world. That is when the protagonists become irrational too. This is shown by the examples of land surveyor K. and Joseph K., but is probably most apparent in the case of Gregor Samsa, transformed into a roach. Instead of the rational protagonist of traditional fantastic stories, the protagonist is now fantastic, and what should be an irrational threat has become a typical rational family.
The Metamorphosis
—now the symbolical depth of the title can be seen. Not only the protagonist and the fantastic story metamorphose, but also the relationship between rational and irrational: the irrational does not threaten the rational, rather the exact opposite.

Kafka’s turnabout within the layout of traditional fantastic would be less striking were it not for the fact that it corresponds to the philosophical insight of a similar turnabout that happens in Enlightenment. This turnabout is perhaps most concisely expressed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their
Dialectic of Enlightenment
. The very first sentence of this book suggests the paradoxical “changing sides” that we note in Kafka. “In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”
⁵
In the light of reason, what appeared was not a liberated man but an enslaved, outdated man,
⁶
as he is called by Gunther Anders, not by chance one of the most important interpreters of Kafka’s opus.
⁷
Interest in Kafka’s opus developed parallel to this insight into the paradoxical nature of Enlightenment: they fueled each other.

We can just imagine that moment in the bright light of the Rational when the irrational, not folly, appeared. This was a watershed moment for humanity, because the world in which it had based the very concept of humaneness collapsed before its eyes. If words are still part of
 reason because they have meaning and create meaning when spoken one after the other, then this very fact makes them anachronous and superfluous for Kafka. A man appears in
The Trial
, “made weak and thin by the height and distance, [who] leaned suddenly far out from it and stretched his arms out even further.”
⁸
A little later, Joseph K. finds himself in the same position, and this analogy between the two men creates an ironic, unconscious communication in which there are no words. And where there are words—at the very end of
The Trial
when the almost dead Joseph K. speaks—they do not call forth other words. When Joseph K. describes his death with the ellipsis “Like a dog!” the men do not react. This very utterance reduces Joseph K. to an animal, a dog, a dehumanized victim. The exclamation mark at the end of the sentence, that raised voice, signals a yearning for the words still to be heard and for them to prevail.

The exclamation mark at the end of Kafka’s
The Trial
echoes the expressionistic
scream
⁹
—a sound that summons not only the absolute fear and anxiety of the modernist but also suggests distrust in language and words as forms of socialization and the foundation of human solidarity. The scream is the concentrated fear of the individual’s fate,
¹⁰
which raises the question of their future after the realization that the modernist project has failed. In answer to this question, on the wings of high modernity appears the regressive figure of the individual:

 mythical man, or a barbarian bringing the solution, as in Kavafi’s well-known verses or Micić’s concept of the decivilizing
barbarogen
.

Threatening the individual, on the other hand, leads to elated non-humaneness, and it is in this context that the futuristic admiration of technology should be read that subsequently leads to elated war as a magnificent, destructive orgy of technology. This elation finds its roots in a different understanding of man, such as that found in Jinger’s diaries from the First World War in which the military spirit consistently avoids any sort of humanistic conclusion before the horrors of the artillery “storm of steel”, at the same time glorifying war as a special situation in which a person can find self-confirmation in a completely different way than during peacetime. Nevertheless, this new military man is still not superman, as a more modern type of individual.

It would be interesting to find out when the attribute
Kafkaesque
first appeared. I suspect it was after the Second World War as an appeasing word in which absolute modernistic fear anchored itself and petered out. This fear emerged in the wake of recent historical horror, the paradoxical nature of the Enlightenment and Kafka’s equally paradoxical fantastic, both founded on the same turnabout: the transformation of the rational into the irrational and reason into non-reason. The attribute
Kafkaesque
is thus part of the process of
becoming accustomed
to the irrational appearing in places where—had the program of Enlightenment not been crushed—the rational would have had to prevail. This peaceful word—peaceful compared to the scream or summoning barbarian solutions—is somewhat imbued with an atmosphere of the postmodern cynicism described in Sloterdijk’s
Critique of Cynical Reason
: “The modern cynic is said to be understood as a borderline melancholic, one who is able to keep the symptoms of depression under control and keep up appearances at both home and work.”
¹¹
The melancholy and bitterness
¹²
mentioned by Sloterdijk fit in well with the description of this atmosphere: every mention of the word
Kafkaesque
has at least an iota of lamentation for the loss of an idea, the idea of enlightenment, a loss that seems impossible to forget.

Or can it be forgotten?

Sloterdijk’s melancholic, bitter cynicism does not exactly agree with the postmodern euphoria evoked by one of its melancholic critics. Frederic Jameson associated this euphoria with Kant’s definition of the exalted. The feeling of exaltation appears as a result of the inability of man’s consciousness to conceive of the size of some architecture and so it appears as absolutely large or absolutely inconceivable. Jameson rightfully notes that the exaltation of technology no longer rests on earlier forms of technological size, such as “turbines . . . silos and chimneys, or Baroque renderings of pipelines and assembly lines, and not even in the aerodynamic profile of trains”
¹³
but rather on the computer. As a result, the feeling of exaltation—that mixture of awe and horror—is caused by the world-wide web, economic, social, IT; however it is denoted, it is something that man’s consciousness cannot conceive. This universal networking and interconnectivity is the source of postmodern euphoria that continues, as we will see, as the equally euphoric new concept of man and humanity.

Now it is possible to show why the attribute
Kafkaesque
essentially clashes with the atmosphere of Zoran Živković’s
The Bridge
, for this novel casts doubt upon a central characteristic of the fantastic world—the
threat
surrounding the protagonist.

The world of the fantastic is an interactive world insofar as it takes the role of the protagonist,
¹⁴
in some interpretations, and is thereby revealed as a threat to the protagonist. In
The Trial
, this threat is paradoxical: Joseph K. is arrested but is left in his own apartment as though
 nothing has happened. The reason for the Tribunal’s gradual closing in on Joseph K. should be sought in the imaginary world of Kafka’s novel: the totality of the interactive network in the imaginary world is more present and at the same time less visible than in the traditional fantastic in which the existence of fantastic chronotypes, such as a castle in a Gothic novel, indicates the restricted
part
of space in which the fantastic world will appear in the form of some sort of spectral (and not divine) hierophant. In Kafka, however,
everything
belongs to the Tribunal and so the Tribunal is all around the protagonist of
The Trial
, and in him as well, because he casts no doubt upon it: thus, instead of the story advancing and resolving the protagonist’s/reader’s perplexity regarding the nature of the events, as happens in traditional fantastic stories, here the story is about the impossibility of any such advancement within the world of the Tribunal, in spite of accepting it. The protagonist’s death is not the result of some visible progress in the trial, but is as irrational as the arrest at the beginning of the

novel.

Živković’s
The Bridge
suggests a postmodern alternative to this modernistic Kafkaesque narrative on the impossibility of advancing in the world of the fantastic and total interconnection that dehumanizes/ kills the individual. In
The Bridge
, a seemingly Kafkaesque atmosphere is transformed into postmodern euphoria that is accompanied by an awareness of the interconnectivity of the world which, for Živković, is more the possibility of a new life than a threat to life, as it is for Kafka. This semantic shift can be shown by comparing Živković’s novel to Kafka’s. First of all, in spite of its seemingly “non-obligatory” nature, the arrest in
The Trial
suggests the protagonist’s obligation to the Tribunal, for in the imaginary world of Kafka’s novel there is no stance outside of the Tribunal. Such a stance nonetheless exists in the imaginary world of Živković’s novel: it is situated in the repeated
bewilderment
of Živković’s protagonists. This enables the reader to identify with the protagonist.

At first glance, Živković seems to be taking one step back from Kafka and not ahead of him, as we are trying to show here. This first impression is deceptive, though. Unlike traditional fantastic that insists on perplexity with regard to the nature of the event (whether or not the event has a rational explanation), the narrators in all three chapters of Živković’s novel do not resolve this dilemma, as a rule, because everything that is known in this regard is
already
known at the beginning of the chapter.

Where Kafka has coercion (the arrest), Živković has free will. And where doubt as to the nature of events appears in Tzvetan Todorov’s analyses, such doubt exists in Živković as well but is
never
resolved. This
twofold difference
gives rise to an unexpected imaginary world in which the protagonists follow a double, a deceased neighbor and an unborn son, but not from the desire to wrench themselves away from some sort of coercion or find out the real nature of the person they are following.

So why are they following them?

This question is not easy to answer, perhaps because of Živković’s singular style where the term minimalist is not enough. The expression “phenomenological reduction” might be used, in the metaphorical sense of course, in order to clarify the link between Živković’s style and the thrust of the novel. The reader might feel Živković’s writing is a radical return to the very essence of things, which means removing any symbolical meaning or intertextual link that things might attract into their orbit. At the same time, the status of the characters (a double, a dead neighbor, an unborn child) and the absurdity of their actions, seen from a realistic viewpoint of course, result in a very deep chasm between Živković’s text and mimicry. If we add the actual anonymity of the narrators who are reduced to record keepers of the oddities of a world, then it becomes clear that reading Živković’s prose leads the reader to the question “and then what happened?” The purpose of this question is provided by the constant
advancement
of the person being followed by the protagonist. The impression of advancing again lies in the fact that the character’s actions fit together like some sort of puzzle, and they also
fit together
on a higher level of interaction between various characters. All of this indicates that behind the apparently absurd acts of the protagonists lies a structure that is slowly being perceived.
¹⁵