Katica Kulavkova - Theory: From Simplification To Paronomasia

Assoc. Prof. Kata Kulavkova, Ph.D.
Department od General and Comparative Literatute
Faculty of Philology: "Sts. Cyril and Methodius" University
Skopje, Republic of Macedonia

FROM SIMPLIFICATION TO PARONOMASIA:
The Re-semantization of the Paradigm of the Turk in Macedonian Literature
(cont.)

The third paradigm is constituted in modern Macedonian literature, especially in short stories and novels, rather than in poetry and drama. It commenced with the vision of the Turk introduced in the short story "The Cigarette Case" (1953) by Gorgi Abadziev (1910-1963). This new pattern affirms the general values of the Turk and re-evaluates his literaty status. It exceed the usual, inherited and conventionalized concepts and prejudices then offers a radically new imagological and etiologic racourse: the Turk is given back the right to an equal start in the labyrinth of the artistic characterizations; he can be a friend, noble, just, ethnical, and the opposite, as all other literary personae... This kind of axiological matrix can freely reproduce and construct variations of various artistic characters with a Turkish signifier: selfish and generous, petty bourgeois and virtuous, egoistic and self-sacrificing.

What is happening in the presentation of the Turk in the short story "The Cigarette Case"? The young and educated Suleiman-beg is a representativer of the progressive ideas of "Young Turkey" and the Young-Turkish Revolution, espousing the idea of "freedom for all nations in the new Ottoman State". Suleiman-beg is educated in Europe (France) and familiar with the democratic currents in the Western world. He supports the revolutionary ideas of the "Kaurs" (trans. note: Turk. non-Muslem nations) and their liberation movement. He is aware of the old pasha-s and beg-s resistance towards the renaissance of Turkey, of the "decline" whereto conservative ideology leads, "the old-fashioned ruling" of the Turkish Empire of that period. One of his replicae presents the apprehension of the Frenchmen of the revolutionary movements in the Ottoman Empire: "Down with him (the Sultan), so that Turkey can start the road of the civilization." At the end, he makes an open gesture of friendship towards Goce Delcev, a historical character who is a prototype of the character with the same name in Gorgi Abadziev's short story, masked as a tradesman, recognized by Suleiman-beg as a neighbour from the by ways of Kukus. He sends regards to Goce's father and mother, and their sincerity is de-coded through the cigarette-case, which becomes a seal of approval of the Turkish intellectuals for the young-Turkish revolution and the liberation movements of the conquered nations, including the Macedonian nation from the pre-Ilinden period (1903).

Such a tendency of re-etching the engraving of the Turk is exposed in the short stories "Procka" and "Violence" by Blaze Koneski (1921-1993), published in his only collection of short stories Grapevines (1995). The semantical threshold of characterizing the Turk is shifted, the ethos is nuanced and individualized. The technique of fashioning cliches, in an extreme version ending up with ethnically motivated discrimination of the literary characters and molding the Turk as an opponent a priori - into a persona non grata in reserve, is replaced by a new methodology that alleviates the characterization of the literary ethoi and topoi from the inherited simplified stereotypes. In the short story "Procka" this alleviation is performed precisely on the most sensitive part of the traditional "Ottoman chronotopic", the religious, through the temporal coinciding of the two festivals, Bayram (minarets and mosques, "Turkmen with fez-s", the neighbour-child Uska) and Procka (festival with ancient pagan provenance and Christianized form) as signals of particular contemporary coexistence, with no special epistemological demarcations.

In the past two decades of the 20 century the paradigm of the Turk integrates the traditionalized aspects of phenomenon and chronotopos of the so-called "Turkish" (time, space, mentality, cultural and language standards, literary context and inter-text) with the modern Macedonian chronotopos in an artistically articulated and polysemantic construct. It functions upon new poetical, modernistic and post-modernistic strategies. They are organized upon the paronomastic and para-rhetorical principle of the esthetization of the latent semantic parallelisms on the background of evident and potent phonologic/semantic similitudes. We emphasize freely the paronomastic construction, not as an ordinary stylistic figure, but in the sense of the supreme, authonomic and immanent poetical principle, situated opposite from the pseudo-literary procedure of simplification.

Vlada Urosevic the myth of the mystery floating as an aura upon the Turkish topic. It is about a certain epitaph concerning Ajsha, daughter of Zejnab Anama from the Ali-Pasha-lineage from Dagestan, about a certain Arabic caravan and camel-guide, and about the pigeons flying down in winter around the Vardar river, as if on a sea-coast, about the spirit of the place (the town) and, again, about face="Book Antiqua" color="#FFFFFF"> (1934) in the short death.

Within Zivko Chingo's narrative works (1935-1987), most interesting for interpretation from the point of a Turkish topos is his posthumous published narration Babadjan. Written in the form of scriptures of the oral tradition or "market stories," (7) purchased in Bask, it contains a great amount of information on the Ottoman epoch, on the frequency of Turkicism/argot and dialecticisms within Macedonian, the longing for Stambol (trans. note: Macedonian name for Istanbul) as a specific kind of Ottoman nostalgia ("Alas King's town, life of kings!", 153; "I will die in this poor Macedonia and I will never see Stambol", 154), on the Macedonian image of the Turks ("he was worse than a Turk at Ramazan"), says Cicko Masala, describing his father, 213; "If you do wrong in Macedonia they will send you to serve, and there is a solution, the 'hava' is Alah's healing, especially for uncatchable illnesses of this kind", or - a paraphrase -"Macedonia is a second mother to the Turks", 84)... The Baska market, where the story of Babadjan had been bought, was considered "a sacred place", due to what it is called "divine feast". This folklorized novel follows the logic of renaissance (short stories connected in cycles) and Rabelais's fiction of the Fair of the Carnival, of the common, anonymous humor and jest ("market of pleasantry"), or black humor, rebellion and rage, of wantonness, freedom and lascivious speech and proverbs... The Turkish intertext holds a primary meaning in informing the stylistic and poetic construction of this fiction by Cingo.

The novel History of Black Love (1996) by Slobodan Mickovic (1935), as pointed by para-text of the title (history in sense of a story), focuses on the subject of the so-called 'black love' or 'kara sevda'. Translating 'kara sevda' with 'black love', as noted by the writer alone in the para-textual introduction of the book, is not perfect: "We are not aware of how the dark, condemning idiom is comprehended in Turkish language - 'kara sevda'. Perhaps it is quite usual and referring to all misfortunate loves. It is not such with us, otherwise people would have already translated it as a 'black love', the literal meaning - yet, no, it has been kept in that borrowed form, this defeating syntagm, 'kara sevda', to express the unutterable tragedy of such love, giving up its own supreme right to name things happening in its own mother tongue, for only through the foreign expression it could have signified the incomprehensibility of the devastation, of human suffering coming from those loves..."

© Katica Kulavkova, 2001-2007. All rights reserved.

© Katica Kulavkova, 2001-2007.
All rights reserved.