In 2005, as a part of The International Seminar for Macedonian Language, Literature and Culture in Ohrid, I gave several lectures, in my attempt to promote the recent success of the few Macedonian female prose authors as a kind of an insurgence of the female script in the Macedonian literature… Amidst the novels which have always provided the main focus of my study, Nikolova’s novel itself, with its title Adam’s Rib, was the only one that pointed out in an auto-referential manner the theme of the other, the woman, within the focus of the novelist perspective. In Macedonian literature, the publication of the short story collection Left Ventricle (2008) represents an important prose release, which announces the female script in a new way: in the harmony and euphony of the represented world of women and the dominant style of narration, which seems to be interwoven with the veil of all of the light’s beams that appear in the spiritual outlook of self-knowing and self-experiencing behind the close eyelids.
Olivera Nikolova (1936) has been continuously present on the Macedonian literary stage since 1963, firs in the field of short fiction, novels and plays for children and young adolescents. She is the author of fourteen prose works for children and young adults (stories and novels); some of them, for almost four decades now, have gone through countless reprints, as assigned readings in the state school curriculums, as well as most of her plays. In the course of the last decade she has been - more so than before - significantly present as a novelist and author who, with each new publication, reveals and explores new topics. She discloses for us new spaces within the context of Macedonian literature and continuously surprises us with innovations and the thorough research in various areas which are the subject of her prose:
- the world of football [soccer] and the adrenaline rush, in the novel The Thrombin (1996);
- the female theme, centered around the life of the Macedonian woman at the beginning of the 20th century versus the life of the contemporary Macedonian woman in the novel Adam’s Rib (2000, The Racin Award);
- the theme of historical religious conversions from Christianity into Islam in the 15th and 16th centuries, set in the magical microcosm of the Old Bazaar in Skopje (in terms of its multi-culturality and the openness-closedness of the topos akin to the one found in Andrić’s The Damned Yard, in the postmodern novel triptych Variations on Ibn Pajko (2000);
- the 19th century and the Macedonian question, as set within the context of the Balkan circumstances (the Macedonian émigrés in Sofia), in the novel Rosica’s Dolls (2004, Novel of The Year Award by “Utrinski vesnik”);
- the present-day Macedonian and Balkan circumstances, set between crime and daily politics in the novel The White Smoke (2009), which are introspectively delivered through the decentralized (ignorant) position of the Macedonian intellectual: in terms of the present problem of cigarette trafficking, which in turn opens the door to the ‘behind-the-scenes’’ world of crime in general, and acts as a reference to the meter of the receptiveness of the saying – “What can be the real price for tobacco this year?”
The short prose collection Left Ventricle (2008) is an instance of introspective female script which, in a subtle way, initiates many times over the female subject matter in Macedonian prose. Ostensibly, these stories present a return to a topic vocalized by the novel Adam’s Rib in a way which no longer signifies an artistic conceptualization of the woman’s Otherness, but rather represents an immediate depiction of her immersion in it, and a vocalization from the inside of her selfhood. With that, we are not presented simply with a collection of stories; rather, it is a script whose montage-like structure is predominantly conceived as a/one book. Each separate story-telling segment in it is realized in an identical manner while, at the same time, each one opens up a new theme or aspect to femininity, thus building a complex, almost web-like structure of relations in the home, family, and society (in terms of the relationships with parents, children, sisters, female friends, female neighbors, someone else’s children…).
The singular manner of narration in these stories stands in unison with the introspective position of the narrator. Thus, this introspective stance of the narrator, which at the same time wishes to avoid the unilateralism of the confessional, presents us with a unique narrative choice of the informal you-point of view.
You travel to your birth place, which you had abandoned forty years ago. Unbearably close is the feeling which will turn you into another person, soft, sentimental, improperly confused; such a feeling shook me all over, through descriptions from books unquestionably richer in words than those that you hold now. The train steams through the plains, your white hairs reflect onto the fogged window, the passing poles, unyieldingly squealing, while bending backwards. You are not depressed. Some sort of a funeral procession, which shakes your frame, cautiously grants you the serenity you’ll need to outlive the shock from the until-now imagined reunion. (Left Ventricle, 2008: 7)
The intimate narration given through the second person has a dual effect. On the one hand, the subject of the narration vis-à-vis the narrated one visually enters a dialogical situation of a conversation with one’s self. In fact, it reads less like a conversation, and more akin to self-observation through a myriad of situations, taken from the position of distance, of meditative contemplativeness. Thus, the modality of the observation grows ever more significant than the time difference which separates the narrator from the narrated. All takes place now: at the moment of the spiritual observation. In a sense, the presented narrative strategy is somewhat reminiscent of the eastern meditation Antar Mouna, which most likely represents the eastern counterpart of the western psychoanalysis, with one difference, which is that the process of self-discovery though the inner psychic knots is not an analytic one, rather a process of peaceful observation and acceptance of the conditions, images and situations that appear as mental projections behind the eye’s veil, in the pensiveness when facing the cosmos of the inner self. This very stance in the narration is the prerequisite for the subtleness with which the femininity of the narration, and of the narrative world in the segments of this book, are revealed.
The first story, also entitled “Left Ventricle”, situates the narration or rather the beginning of the story of self-knowing as one of getting to know another, in the later years of life, in the attempt to recognize and rediscover the one self from before. In this story, as with the other ones, Nikolova achieves the desired effect through exemplary storytelling, with a fast-paced plot development, often times dramatically entangled, and solved, at times, through an apt use of the anecdotal, but always with a subtle hand, addressing and vocalizing the key themes of being human in the world: corporeality and its transformations, birth (“Scent”), sickness (“Smile”), dying, and certainly, the extended role of biological motherhood as part of the social care and nursing of the other – the child (“Key”, “A Slap”), or an elderly parent (“Feet”). With that, in Nikolova’s stories, through a gusto of spirit and spiritedness, the question of the female presence torn between the care for the other and a creative partaking of the world is subtly vocalized (“The Market”, “Peas”). The sublimation of each individual segment, which always refers to a key psychic element, has been freed from any unnecessary details or embellishments, so that the immediacy but also the symbolism present, unfold for us a rich world of the attributes of the female psyche as entrenched in a social web of relations. The reality of this female sensitivity as part of her corporeality, of man’s corporeality in general, in most of the given stories has been presented along the axis of the Socratic skillfulness in ‘the delivery of the souls’: between irony and wisdom. The second effect, however, of the intimacy of the you-narrative perspective, lies in the possibility it offers the female readership, but also readers in general. As a matter of fact, all ‘born to a woman’ are offered this self-projection, or the projection found in that ‘you’ of the beloved face of the women in our lives: the mother, the wife, the daughter. Along those lines, Nikolova’s stories are a particular accomplishment of the singular female script: exciting in its sublimation, wise in its spirituality, ironic in its playfulness with the pragmatic situations of being human.
Each of the individual stories, thus, is a world in and of itself, and each one deserving of an individual and separate reading. The first story, along those lines, would serve as an exemplar for the skillful narrative dramaturgy of Nikolova, who manages to turn the pathos of the story of returning home after forty whole years into an anecdotal story, while taking into account the existential pain of mutual unfamiliarity, both for the returnee and the birth place, by relying on the comedic dramaturgy of such an unfamiliarity. With that, this story of role switching is equally vocal of our very own human presence in the world, which in the pragmatic social communication oftentimes casts us in the role of strangers in our own lives. The anecdotal, or the comedic unfolding of the journey back home, when accidentally meeting the unknown couple from the adjacent table and ‘playing professionally’ the role she has been cast in – the woman they had been expecting – in fact, in spite of the comedic techne, sounds off the irony of the existential pain of mistaken identity in encounters. I mentioned previously that the reality of experiencing the corporeality in this prose is often times depicted along the axis of the Socratic skillfulness of ‘the delivery of the souls’: between irony and wisdom. This very first story, carrying the same title as the collection itself, is illustrative in that regard. The narrative skillfulness Nikolova exhibits with the theme of the journey back home in quest of one’s former self transforms it into a web-like story of the uncertainty which goes with any entrenched identity, taking into account the transformations of the body which serve as levers of the creative frivolity of the spirit. The quest for the realization of selfhood in the realm of one’s birth place, after forty years, and the comedic twist of the string of ‘mistaken identities’, finally, in the accidental encounter with a boy, receive the following resolution:
“Are you an aunty or an uncle?”
“What do you think”, you humor yourself.
“I think…that you are an aunty,” pronounces the little one.
The circle is complete? Does it pass through, in those very words, the birth place though the left ventricle?” (The Left Ventricle)
In such an unfolding of events, in Nikolova’s story, we also hear the echo of the Sphinx’s riddle, whose solving presents itself also as a happily found key-pass to the solving of the enigma of the gender polarity entangled in the niches of its secret. The transformations of corporeality, the singularity of being human, those are the exact foundations of the narrative self-actualization in the subsequent vocalization of the numerous, in fact, confessional segments.
“Left Ventricle”, the titular short story, is the initial, first in the collection, which commences the narration while situating the female narrator within her own life, her own body as her own space, and her own time in the world. The body, the corporeality of being, its transformations, liquids as symbols of dissolving, of self-dissolving into the metamorphosis, but also as a medium towards reaching out for the other (even if that be her own offspring at the moment she finds herself facing the sacrament of birth – ”Scent”), provide the anchors of the web of the narrated. I use the term ‘web of the narrated’ because right here, at the level of plot, the entwined intricacies of the narration herald the femininity of this prose script. If you ask yourself, for example, what happens in the story “Scent”, you might find yourself in a bind, propelling the following answer: the female narrator becomes a grandmother. And in the story “Peas”? ‘The female neighbors shell off a mountain of peas’; and in “A Smile”? ‘A crazy lady laughs in the hospital’.
In “Scent”, however, what actually takes place is the emergence of the offspring in the scent of the blood which surrounds it. A bleeding occurs, which cannot be expressed through a finite verb. This bleed-like swelling takes place through the numerous digressions in the narration, without paying attention to the plot summary display and its delivery so as to withhold the mannerism of male eroticism, to borrow from Susan Winnett’s terminology.[1] The connotative side to the narration, in its observant focus on the internal (spiritual) landscape, does not lead the plot to one single event which in turn would justify, deplete, the tension in the narration. In “Scent”, in fact, the narration is neither conducted nor conceived of through the build-up of the tension to the point of climax, which would provide for its release, resolve, in a situation of an exacted change. No attention is paid to provide or follow such a recourse in the fabula. What is vocalized is the act of giving birth as a false change: the offspring, even after the birth, is engulfed by a netting of blood. The bond with the womb has not been severed. That is the announcement of the blood’s scent.This in turn, is what announces the short story. It is not an announcement of a severance, an ending along those lines, nor is it an announcement of the plot and the story as a thanatographically completed and fulfilled act.
The story “A Smile”, on the other hand, may serve as an illustration of the connotative side of the narration in this book which allows for the narrated segments to elude the pitfalls of a one-sided interpretation. We could also say that in the story, up to a point, a discharge of female laughter occurs. From a recalling through memory of her own smile, petrified in the light’s catch on the mirror’s surfaces, all through the experience of celebrating life in ‘the sun’s emission’ of the laughter of the woman whose echo pierces the space of the hospital, the sick and their visitors, infatuated, are awakened by a curiosity:
The hospital doors slowly opened: the sick, some aided by crutches, others with bags of urine in their midst, trying to stand their ground, pale in the face, yet with an insurmountable curiosity, started to come forward, with smiling faces, eager to witness the source of this bedazzling joy which lifted them from their beds. Their glances asked you questions, even verbalizing them, asking you, who stood opposite the shut door, yourself under its infectious influence. Cajoled by this limitless, selfless gift, which begged a response, some sort of support, you decided on a cunning move, knowing it to be a shameful one. You decided to open the door ajar, as if to peek inside by accident and steal a glance – not at the woman you had already spotted, but at the man who had succeeded in transforming this woman into a radiating and beaming creature, one who reaps joy and provides uplift (2008: 93).
Till the moment of reckoning with the paralyzing expression of the Gorgon’s smile:
There was no one else in the room. The seated woman from the armchair, with the frozen, petrifying smile, had directed her glance at an imagined spot in the corner of the ceiling, not because of a stimulus she found in it, rather due to the illusion of her own madness (2008: 93).
Experiencing the stranger’s laughter, however, realized through the framework of dual narration (by using a novelistic twist), in Nikolova’s story, in fact, is not actually an experience of a strange woman’s laughter. The Janus face of her laugher is in fact the Janus face of the abyss of our own smile under the surface of the mirror which leads us into the narrative world. Thus, it is the Janus face of joy in encounters, in the meetings with the other through the ‘miracle of a mutual reflection’. The entire world of being human, in the celebration of life’s creation, in Nikolova’s story, through a few moves, minimalist at best, is at the same time transformed into a paralytic image of destruction through the use of the archetype of the fatality of the female character[2], but also through a caring weaving of the thread of connotation, which, sooner than later, from word to word, sentence into sentence, performs for us the deception of appearance if we insist on it depicting clearly defined shapes and meanings. The smile is of course a symbol, which, however, Nikolova uses almost as a prop, in a minimalist performance of the drama of the world and of existence. As the story “Peas” reads, shelling off peas is only a prop which demarks the space of the mine field in the conversations of female friends. The pilling of the mountain of shelled peas graphically represents the accumulation of tension in the disclosing and escaping of the traps of the ‘mine field’ of neighborly conversation while, at the same time, setting it within the justification of its pragmatic context, as an extension of the biological function of birth/life giver/s in the social care realm of caretaker/s. The minimalism in the narrative strategy of Nikolova, in fact, is focused on these very same ‘female props’. Of course, this claim, of the use of the smile as a ‘prop’ in the performance of the text, may be opposed. Perhaps, still, in continuation of this mine, at present, more of a stylistic demarcation of the function of the smile, I would like to point to the beginning of the story “A Smile”, which initiates us into the narration by a depiction of the practice, or of the fixing of the smile in front of a mirror. Notwithstanding, for there is another key symbol I would like to include at this stage, as part of the sling of ‘props’ that this script uses: the female foot. Therefore, I would like to leave aside for now the debate over ‘symbol’/’prop’, anticipating in advance the possible comments that may ensue and the need for a better supported argumentation which in this analysis is not of key interest. Thus, with a degree of distance, I would like to mention that the term ‘prop’ has been used here in the function of accentuating the minimalist strategy with which the smile, like the foot, through the multi-functionality of their use, is so pronounced that we may accept it, to a degree, as a character. The real protagonist of this prose remains to be She or The One whose face stands as elusive and distant in the fastness and omnipresence of one’s being as found on the threshold of the polyvalence of some main concepts in rationalizing, such as nature and culture. Henceforth, smiling or the appearance of the foot, much like shelling off peas, are props of the manifestation of Her being, elusive to the plurality of its fastness in the web of social relations which this prose enacts.
The female foot is a highly powerful symbol which, through the language of antiquity, pronounces the sacredness of the blood on the wounded feet of Cinderella’s step-sisters, for who her slipper is not intended[3]. The foot, or Baba Yaga’s claw, on the other hand, has been ethnographically and folkloristically examined in the novelistic discourse of Dubravka Ugrešić as a symbol of the potency of the mortar, the womb of her incarnation (Ugrešić, 2008). As with the characters in Ugrešić’s novel, so in Nikolova’s short story “Feet” (both published in the same year), the mother’s old, stringy foot with clenched and stiffened toes bears the connotations of the omnipotency of the caregiver and bringer of life (toes – more like roots). The relationship to her own foot and the care for her mother’s foot in Nikolova’s story reinstates the symbolism of the foot within the context of the blood’s and life’s flow, i.e., their circularity, the circular pathway of fulfilling one’s being. Along those lines, the understanding of the foot as a sex fetish is overridden; instead, the multi-discursiveness of its meanings branches out vis-à-vis the upkeep and renewal of life, its secret contained in the sanctity of the blood. The mother’s foot, in fact, is that very same pronouncement which brings with it the sapling planted on the mother’s grave in the Cinderella tale. This foot-sapling is the source of the magic powers of the mother’s care (later on, in the Disney version of the story, exacted through the magic wand of the Fairy Godmother). In fact, this is a story-telling of the essence of the mother-daughter relationship (Eliacheff, Heinrich, 2004).
The scent, smile, foot, shelling off peas, in the context of the everyday situations which are conveyed by the individual segments – oftentimes bridging over their separateness[4] – Nikolova depicts, as I had mentioned before, as multi-functional and with that, as sublimated, without any ornamentations of the mise-en-scéne that become semantic knots of the mental projections in thinking about unilaterality in the multitude of the world. These stories depict that very same ebb and flow of such sensitivity. This is just what marks the particularity of this prose script, yet, we should emphasize that in other stories, for instance, like the already mentioned “Left Ventricle”, a discourse is enacted which skillfully joggles these two types of narration: the female one, which I would mark as mediatedly associative, one that surrenders to the disinterested observation of the course of images that take place in the inner cosmos, and the dynamic, or active one, which knows how to correspond or, when needed, make use of the ascertained practices of joggling tension, as is the case with the insertion of the ‘comedic’ plans of mistaken identity in maintaining the tension of the narration. Yet, that too, is presented in the function of outlining the framework theme of the stories’ narration, the one about the singular constant in being – in the change, i.e., the transformations of corporeality and identity.
On the topic of the change in the prospective and the retrospective pulsation that leads Nikolova’s narration, in the Afterword to this collection, Nikola Gelevski proclaims the fusion of the Dionysian and Apollonian principles, taking cue from Camille Paglia’s terminology. This observation, with which I would also agree, refers, however, more to the depicted world of this prose (outlined by the landscape of corporeality and liquids, rain, blood, scent, feet, offspring, death) than to the way the narration is carried out. Both planes, nonetheless, to be as accurate as possible, in their mutual convergence and completion, are the true and authentic value of the female-ness of this script by Nikolova.
Translation: Bela Gligorova
Works Cited:
Eliacheff, Caroline. Heinrich, Natalie. 2004. Majke – kćeri. Zagreb: Prometej.
Гелевски, Никола. 2008. „За авторот и делото“ поговор, во: Николова, Оливера. Лева комора. Скопје: Темплум.
Николова, Оливера. 2008. Лева комора. Скопје: Темплум.
Palja, Kamil. 2002. Seksualne perskone. Beograd: Zepter Book World. (trans. from Cammille Paglia: Sexual Personae)
Winnett, Susan. 1990. Comming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrattive, and Principles of Pleasure, PMLA, No. 3.
Ugrešić, Dubravka. 2008. “Baba Jaga za početnike“, in: Baba Jaga je snijela jaje. Beograd: Geopoetika.
Manuela Zlatar. 2007. „Како је Perrault kastrirao Pepeljugu“: 71-90. во: Novo čitanje bajke:arhetipsko, divlje, žensko, Zagreb
[1]In her study “Comming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrattive, and Principles of Pleasur“, Susan Winnett juxtaposes the thanatographic retrospectiveness of the male orgasm with the prospectiveness of the female one, and in the given context, she sets out to interpret the transformations of the male, that is to say, the female body (Winnett 1990).
[2]The archetype of the female fatality and its manifestations are the cornerstones of Camille Paglia’s inquest (Palja, Kamil 2002).
[3]On the many incantations of this symbol, in its numerous variants of the Cinderella tale, see: “Како је Perrault kastrirao Pepeljugu“, in Manuela Zlatar's Novo čitanje bajke: arhetipsko, divlje, žensko, Zagreb 2007: 71-90.
[4] For instance, we may compare the role of the appearance of the foot in the story “Rain” with the one in the story “Feet”. The plot of its appearance in the former (where the nudity of the toe of the female foot appears in front of the moist earth, as if pointing the way out of the frustration) is enacted through its multi-layered symbolism in depicting the world of the female folk-belief in the latter, the story “Feet”.