Table of Contents
Dogs and Others
Translator's Preface
In Place of an Introduction
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A Death in the Neighbourhood: On the Work of Biljana Jovanović
Bibliography
The Translator
BILJANA JOVANOVIĆ
DOGS AND OTHERS
Translated by John K. Cox
First published in 2018 by Istros Books
London, United Kingdom www.istrosbooks.com
Copyright © Estate of Biljana Jovanović, 2018
This book was first printed in Serbia, Psi i ostali (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1980).
The right of Biljana Jovanović, to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
Translation © John K. Cox , 2018
Cover design and typesetting: Davor Pukljak, www.frontispis.hr
ISBN
Print: 978-1-912545-16-2
MOBI: 978-1-912545-17-9
ePub: 978-1-912545-18-6
The publisher wishes to acknowledge the support of the Serbian Ministry of Culture & Media in the publication of this book.
Translator’s Preface
Most names and other proper nouns in this translation have been left in their original Serbo-Croatian (as Jovanović would have said) forms. An exception was made for the most common version of the narrator’s first name, Lidija, which we have rendered as Lidia for the sake of readability.
The text used as the basis for this translation was Biljana Jovanović’s Psi i ostali (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1980).
Understanding This Book
Certain generalizations about plot or style, or specific notes on scenes, hard-won by another reader, can make a complex, or intricate, novel such as this one easier to understand. For instance, without a character list for the whole work, it might be helpful to untangle all the characters whose names begin with the letter ‘M’:
Marina – the mother of Lidia and Danilo, who is mostly absent and often cruel
Marko – Danilo’s dodgy friend
Mihailo – the father of Lidia and Danilo, who hanged himself a decade or so ago
Milena – Lidia’s lover, a friend of Danilo and Čeda Little River
Mira – Danilo’s girlfriend
In terms of style, readers should be aware that Lidia’s narration contains many meta-references (e.g., questions about things she just said) and ‘experienced details’ in the tradition of the French nouveau roman; there are also neologisms (sometimes adjectives, as in ‘crumby’, as opposed to ‘crummy’; but often adverbs, as in ‘postmanly’ and ‘bankerly-cordially’) and, in recorded speech, drawled or drawn-out words spelled with urgently repeated vowels.
Subject matter such as bodily fluids (snot, semen, rheum, secretions connected to sexually-transmitted diseases), raw sexuality, and characters pinioned uncomfortably in the city’s infernal machine might qualify the text as a kind of ‘dirty realism’, but its political content is equally obvious. The settling of accounts of a traditional-minded man (is it a man?) with. second-wave feminism in Chapter 25 is highly unsettling, but instructive.
There are many ways to read, or interpret, this novel. Literary critics have noted that it is here, in her second major work of prose, that Jovanović ‘found her voice’. Indeed, her breakout success from two years earlier (1978), Pada Avala (Eng.: Avala is Falling) became a cult classic; and although it was, in the opinion of this translator, far too transgressive and energetic to deserve the label ‘jeans prose’, that is how it is often designated to this day. But Dogs and Others delivered a wholescale re-imagination of the role of the author and the narrator, and here Jovanović took her art to a different level. (Her third novel, My Soul, My One and Only from 1984, and her unfinished fourth novel from the 1990s, move into different territory yet again.)
Literary scholars, of course, also sort out how this book is put together, how it functions, and why it works. One notices immediately the pell-mell energy of the digressive narration; the intertextuality (various letters, pamphlets, and flashbacks set off from the main text); the mystifying epigraphs; and the free and stubborn images – dreams looking for vocabulary, images looking for form. And yet, the novel holds together. The red threads lead somewhere. The references come home to roost. It’s not a farce, not an ironic romp, not an act of heedless satire or feckless cynicism.
Consideration or analysis of the content of the novel is also both demanding and valuable. Jovanović herself noted that the novel was ‘a debt, a debt to myself, to bring things that seemed important to me at the time out into the open, and to strip them completely naked’. Is this novel the fruit of the evolution of the increasing tide of creditable woman-centred writing in Yugoslavia, distilled into rocket fuel by the addition of feminist sensibilities from the West? How important is the fact that this novel contains what appears to be the first detailed depiction of a sexual relationship between two women in Serbian literature?
Interesting historical explanations, stressing the socio-economic or even political context of the plot and the times in which the manuscript was produced and published, are also possible. Jovanović was too young to be a direct part of the ‘generation of 1968’, but not too young to engage or interact (positively and negatively) with that movement’s causes and ideals. She was definitely too young to be considered one of the ‘children of communism’. Related phenomena such as membership in the ‘red bourgeoisie’ or, as some of her critics might say, her generation’s position as beneficiaries of post-war social mobility who supposedly repaid the system with unruliness or anarchism also miss the mark, but they are in circulation. Also plausible are critiques of work like hers from the Marxist or neo-Marxist; the presence of the Praxis philosophers in Yugoslavia during her lifetime provides a lot of ready material for analysis. One could also take, ideologically or historically, a Titoist perspective, whereby Jovanović’s novels can be seen to deviate from the established canon of ‘socialist aestheticism’ or ‘Partisan realism’. One could also maintain, as does this observer, that Jovanović’s attention to radically new subjects and her transgressive literary innovations amount to social criticism, which in turn represents a kind of urban extension, and logical continuation, of the ‘anti-fascist moment’ of World War II.
John K. Cox, Fargo, USA. 2018
*
This translation is dedicated to William E. ‘Bill’ Schmickle, the most brilliant teacher I ever had. No one ever lit up Founders Hall or Duke Memorial with ideas and lectures and writing the way he did, and no professor ever pushed me as hard or rewarded me as generously.
In Place of an Introduction
This story does not consist of night-and-day phantasmagorias, but of Dogs and Others. No joke: Others and Dogs. Since a position favouring the relativity of truth is psychologically more justifiable than one favouring the absoluteness of truth, and since it’s not out of the question that it’s also epistemologically more reliable, then it’s true – and let us thank God for it – it’s true, that which is written in books, in church and in other places: Dogs always believe that they belong to
Others (whom they consider to be, for unknown reasons enduring right up to our day, better than they are). The Others are not always convinced that they are not themselves Dogs. Still, though, Dogs are Others and Others are Dogs. The one thing that actually distinguishes them from each other, now and again (and something that justifies singling them out for participation in this story), is the level of their (as numerous personages are wont to say, and learned ones at that) social adaptation.
What nonsense! What’s this sort of thing supposed to mean to Dogs? Or especially to Others?
Whatever – both the one group and the other suffocate in the same typical stinking mess that is life:
I
For a longish, and rounded, amount of time (like a lie on Jaglika’s lips), I took, with the certainty of an idiot, her stories and those of Marina to be images from my own childhood; and of course I believed unshakably in my ownership of those images. I’m not sure when that all went up in smoke! All efforts up to this point have been inaudible (unsuccessful), like clacking one’s dry, untrimmed fingernails together or timidly scratching the edge of a table with a pin; there was a huge tangle in my head and I felt it whenever I tried to remember something, or with inappropriate ambition tried to recall anything at all with complete accuracy; the bit that I could get my hands on was quickly lost amid the concentric braid of other pictures, and there was no way for me to find the beginning or the end. And then everything snapped, went off like a bomb; no; like a hundred and twenty glasses tossed from the tenth floor; and nothing remained; not even anything like the rubber stub that’s left behind when a balloon pops or, you know, an inflated plastic bag explodes.
I was free! I realized that I remembered nothing, that, instead of me, Jaglika and Marina were doing the remembering; that I had never recalled anything; and that the two of them were swindling me and, sneakily, and stealthily (kisses and baby-talk), pulling me into the mutual family memory. I thought: such gratitude for emptiness! I could shove everything inside (where it’s empty, like into the biggest hole in the world); falsehoods from anybody; even the most far-fetched, random fabrications. That’s how I started off inventing my own childhood; with no malice and no vanity; with empty space inside myself, around me, all around, everywhere…
Everything that I would think up and narrate to myself, in a whisper at first; once or twice – depending on the length of the story; and then I would repeat it out loud, before going to sleep, with my eyes wide open, in the dark; and the story (an image from childhood – which only appeared not to exist) would settle into its spot in my brain.
The next day I checked: I would sneak up on Jaglika, and start up a conversation first about her glasses, then her aching joints, homeless women and cuckolded men; and then, in the middle of the conversation, I would say, as if by chance: ‘Hey, baba, do you remember that?’ Or: ‘What was that like, baba? You used to know that…’ Jaglika would ask what I was getting at, and wriggle joyously in her seat – happy that I had faith in her memory, and that’s how she fell into the trap. I told her only the basic framework of a story (the picture), devised the night before, leaving out the dates and more detailed parts; otherwise Jaglika would discover my deception. And so she could continue the stories one after another to the end.
For several days running, I carried every fabricated story (in my arms, in my mouth) to the half-deaf and half-blind Jaglika. The fact that Jaglika took part wholeheartedly in it all only showed that it was realistic to assume that all the pictures (stories), from this point on, as far as the eye could see, all of them made or invented by night, happened or were happening, or were just about to happen, at some time or other and to some person or other, or even to me!
At that point it took me a great deal of time to realize that I imagined some of these things as: freedom of fabrication, that is to say, freedom of memory; one could say that I was suffering from unknown illnesses, but I had attributed special significance to them; I thought I’d be able to disconnect from the family memory (Jaglika the creator – her memories go back the furthest; Marina the great magus; Danilo and I, the assistants; our relatives – probationary helpers) simply because I truly recalled nothing! And that the flexible hole (no limits) in my brain was the reason that I believe I became a heretic by my own volition and merit; and in fact every invention was overloaded in advance; it was only possible to concoct things according to how they happened and not in any other way. And it all looked like this: I’d think up a story; I’d try absolutely as hard as I could (dear God, it’s so taxing!) not to alter it even the tiniest bit; I’d push it (the story), just temporarily; I’d move it around exactly as much as necessary for space to open up, at least one tiny little spot in my otherwise meagrely-stocked brain, for the next image (story); and so on, one after the other; I’d find a spot for one, and when the next one arrived, I’d move it, and when the third one came in, I’d even have to squish that second one, too; but before I’d compress it I’d push it gently and politely to the back, as if we were on the bus: ‘Just a bit more, if you don’t mind, so I can set down my bag … Beg your pardon, oh little brain of mine with the images, make a little room for me!’ And then they (the ones in the bus) would say: ‘Check that out. As if her pictures, or her brain, were anything special. I mean, really!’
To tell the truth, there is one little thing pertaining to the fabrication of childhood that turns out to be an advantage when compared to a non-fabricated, so-called genuine childhood: there isn’t any subconscious or similar understory; there’s no interpretation; there is none of that clowning around with psychoanalysis; the possible objection from those quarters (from the psychoanalysts and other, different people) would call into question completely my invention of a childhood (calling it non-memory, or the equivalent thereof) – such a thing (my thing) simply isn’t possible all by itself; that it would come down like a bolt out of the blue without reasons, up there in the blue; but since psychoanalysis still cannot discern how something started, and that is its position, at least as far as I’m concerned – at the bottom of the water with a stone on my neck, plus a rope – but for others, okay, maybe it’s not quite drowning but it is ‘That’s kind of like old news, or a little bit pregnant.’
So what I told Jaglika went like this: there were dark hallways all around me; on the walls hung small black and white pictures of various animals, like those little drawings in the chocolate bars that came in the blue wrappers; these extremely tall people kept showing up; more and more of them; I think it was always at noon (how did I know that, if there wasn’t any window!); they measured my forehead; they wrote on some pieces of paper; shook their heads as they were leaving, every one of them did it and they all did it the same way (as if they were duplicates, or rather doubles, of each other) and always, I mean really every time, they said the same thing: ‘Her face is narrow and ill-humoured; see you tomorrow, goodbye!’
And Jaglika told it to me like this: ‘The dark corridors are the basement where we used to live; it was always dark; you were sick with scarlet fever; that’s when Dr Vlada used to come by, every single day… Do you remember Vlada?… He checked in on you… You weren’t good for anything, and we all thought you were going to die…’
Thus, according to Jaglika, the little pictures on the walls were flypaper strips, and the pieces of paper were prescriptions; since it was dark, the fact that it seemed like midday to me was the result of a large high-wattage lamp, which Dr Vlada would turn on above my head, and so forth.
Fantastic! Jaglika thought it all up; indeed Jaglika did think it all up, as did I, incidentally! Never, and I knew this for sure, never did we live in a basement; we never had sticky fly-paper tape on our walls; and especially never any lamp with a big bright bulb; I never had scarlet fever, and so on … After several similar attempts (a tale told to Jaglika; with her just fabricating it differently) I was no longer capable of differentiating what was Jaglika’s from what was mine from what was a third party’s, that Jaglika, as demiurge, truly remembe
red (the right of the creator is untouchable even when she is lying). It seemed to me that I was again getting tangled in a snare (what a stupid animal!) of other people’s memories, no matter whether real or fabricated, and that the imagined freedom of emptiness has the shape and the sizzle of a lie, a lie from Jaglika’s cracked lips. I gave up on talking to anyone, save to myself, in the evening, in the dark, eyes wide open; along with all the others, I received a new power of imagination: I believed that every story was irrevocably true.
But Jaglika did not leave off; she enjoyed talking and watching my face full of trust (a creator also needs flattery); she extracted from her head piece after piece of outright lying (truly one never knows!), carefully, as if she were brushing lock after lock of her hair, which by the way did not exist; I did not have many opportunities, more precisely, I had just one possibility: ‘Baba, how about if I read the newspaper out loud. Eh, granny? Put those stories of yours away for now!’ Jaglika, however, would shake her head unhappily, bring her morning cup (full of dust – it was already noon) of tea (the orator was taking refreshment) to her lips and go on babbling; she just pushed those little extracts right into my ears, along with her lies, which were no worse than mine but for exactly that reason created unbearable confusion in my head. ‘Baba, stop it … That’s not important anymore, it’s the past,’ I said repeatedly; and then I would cover her in loud headlines from her favourite newspapers: woman is the pillar of the family, woman factory owner kills her child so her lover will marry her, directions for large and small needlepoint projects, freshen up your surroundings; and in this way, not stopping until I was dead certain that Jaglika had forgotten what she’d been recalling; and until she stopped grumbling: ‘OK, OK, but I’ve got a good one for you.’ Normally this took half an hour, sometimes less, and then Jaglika’s face would light up; then I would wander around the room looking for her glasses – she never knew where she’d left them just a moment before, but they were always either on the window sill or under her pillow.
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