There Was Once A Country
An impossible chronotope in the writings of Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić

Abstract

This article addresses the construction and role of the former Yugoslavia as what the author terms a ‘relational chronotope’ in the diasporic writing practices of two women writers: Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić. In novels such as Ugrešić's The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998) and The Ministry of Pain (2004), and Drakulić's S.: A Novel about the Balkans (1999), all of which have had substantial success in the European book market, the times and spaces of the former Yugoslavia coalesce in an impossible chronotope. Rather than being figured as either a space or a non-space, the chronotope of the former country spreads and disseminates, penetrating narratively into various other European places and experiences, and binding these places and experiences to the interiority of the diasporic, or displaced, narrative subject. This ‘relational’ chronotope and its narrative resultants (the establishment of a memory map of an impossible place or of an interior cadaver) have a distinctive association with the figuration of space and time in melancholia. The article argues that functioning as a potent, if uncertain, channel of reparation, this chronotope presents itself as a particularly adequate strategy for the narrative negotiation of a traumatic history.

Keywords:

• post-conflict trauma
• diasporic writing
• chronotope
• melancholia
• Yugoslavia

Notes

Following Mikhail Bakhtin's elaboration in ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, I use the term ‘chronotope’ to denote the artistic representation of temporal and spatial relationships in literature. Such representation is based on the fusion of spatial and temporal indicators into one ‘carefully thought-out, concrete whole’ upon which the structure and generic distinctiveness of literary work depends (Bakhtin, 1981: 84–5).