Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

Making his way through a crowded Zagreb square one evening on the eve of World War II, Melkior Tresi catches sight of a priest with familiar, jutting ears. The priest, we learn, had taught him catechism during his childhood in Dalmatia. The fleeting glimpse of the Dalmatian priest in the opening pages of this quintessentially Zagreb novel is Ranko Marinkovis nod to his native Dalmatia. The nod tells us that Melkior Tresi is an outside insider, someone who, like Marinkovi, came to the city as a student, and who sees Zagreb as someone born there never could. Marinkovi captures Zagrebs crowds, the shysters, the army barracks, and the seedy neighborhoods in one of the most famous fictional portraits of the city, yet he peoples the novel with a closely knit group whose playful jibes and cheerful ignorance of the portentous events taking shape around them have a certain resonance with the insular Mediterranean culture in which he was raised.

When Marinkovi set out to write CYCLOPS in the early 1960s he was thinking big. In shaping his plot he reached for the big writers, such as Joyce (whose Ulysses had first been translated into Croatian in 1957), Homer, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevsky. For all the influence of other literatures, however, the novel is anchored firmly in a more local context. The story unfolds on the streets between the Zagreb main square and the Opera House, and the streets and cafs are inhabited by the poets, actors, and other public figures of Marinkovis student years in Zagreb. Along with the readily identifiable references to Hamlet and Leopold Bloom, the narrative and dialogue are interwoven with allusions to various Croatian writers and their characters and to verses of Croatian poets all unfamiliar to American readers, including Ivan Gunduli,1 Ivan Brli-Maurani,2 a character of Krleas,3 and lines of verse by Vladimir Nazor,4 Vladimir Vidri,5 Ivo Vojnovi,6 and Tin Ujevi,7as well as mentions of equally unfamiliar Serbian writers such as Simo Pandurovi8 and Jovan Dui.9 The panorama of Zagreb life in the opening pages of the novel, the MAAR street advertisements, the vendors selling shoelaces, are authentic images of Zagreb life of the late thirties, and Jutarnji List (Morning News) is still hawked by vendors on Zagrebs streets.

There are many comparisons that can be drawn between CYCLOPS and other works of literature, most obviously Ulysses, the Odyssey, and Hamlet. But the irreverence, irony, and satire with which Marinkovi dissects Zagreb cultural life on the eve of World War II also resonate with Joseph Hellers Catch-22 (1961). Hellers biography affords a surprisingly productive comparison with Marinkovis. They both were playwrights and short-story writers, as well as novelists, and they were close in age. Heller fought in active combat in World War II, unlike Marinkovi, who spent the war as an internee and refugee, but both of them were the first, for their respective readerships, to write of World War II in a darkly humorous vein. And they were each known chiefly for their first novel, each of which became a huge best seller, never to be outshone by anything else they later wrote.

The year CYCLOPS was published (1965) was pivotal for postwar Yugoslavia. It followed on a period of furious economic growth during the late 1950s and a repressive spell that came after Yugoslavias break with Cominform in 1948. There were major economic reforms in 1965, and the next year saw the dismissal of the Minister of the Interior, Aleksandar Rankovi, over a wiretapping scandal, which became the symbolic end of the immediate postwar period. The Yugoslav government began allowing its citizens to travel abroad freely in 1966, thereby setting itself apart from the Eastern European countries that were still behind the iron curtain, and these political and economic reforms were accompanied by a thaw in culture. After a brief spell of socialist realism in the early fifties, the literatures in Yugoslavia had asserted a modicum of artistic independence, but only within limits (there could be no mention of the Goli Otok and other prison camps, or articulation of nationalist and separatist sentiments, or scurrilous mention of the person of Josip Broz Tito). The limits relaxed somewhat in the 1960s, which was a decade for ferment in all the arts.

Marinkovis CYCLOPS, published in the midst of all this, and Death and the Dervish, by Mea Selimovi, which appeared a year later, were groundbreaking novels that brought new intellectual depth to the treatment of controversial issues, such as, in CYCLOPS, the use of irony and satire in the treatment of the recent war, and, in Death and the Dervish the nature of repressive authority. As soon as it appeared, CYCLOPS was showered with accolades, including the NIN award the most prestigious recognition for literary works in the former Yugoslavia,10 and the same happened with Death and the Dervish the following year.

To say that Marinkovi raised eyebrows with his ironic treatment of the war theme in CYCLOPS is not to suggest that there had been no antiwar Croatian prose before him. Miroslav Krlea, in particular, is famous for his antiwar stories after World War I. Where Marinkovi broke new ground was in his use of irony and satirical humor to transgress the various strictures imposed by the victorious Partisans on how the conflict would be described in the years following the war. But it was precisely the madcap brand of humor, the sly nicknames used by the denizens of Zagrebs cafs, the fantastical tales of shipwrecked sailors confronted by cannibalistic natives in the South Pacific, the ingenuity with which Melkior Tresi keeps himself out of combat, that gave the novel its irresistible charm and steered it through the sensitive political waters of the day.

Marinkovi studied psychology at Zagreb University in the 1930s. He was intrigued by the psychology of the artist and was drawn, in particular, to Tin Ujevis verse and the workings of the poets psyche. While still a student, he published three brief articles11 on Ujevi,12 in which he remarks on something mysterious, special and remarkable, almost unintelligible in Ujevis personality.13 Marinkovi credits Dostoyevsky with having a formative influence on Ujevis preoccupation with suffering, humiliation, and pain. He wonders whether Ujevis bohemian eccentricity is a form of mental illness, and concludes that with an ear for the right resonance one could enter into this complex, chaotic psychology. Marinkovi also describes the way Ujevi represents love and the feminine in his verse, saying that Ujevi is a poet of spiritual love, the erotic turned mystical, stripped of its sexuality, love that is felt with a sixth sense, like music,14 a poet who perceives woman as a symbol of creative mystery.15 Marinkovi and Ujevi got to know each other later, and there are several Zagreb anecdotes stemming from their relationship, particularly that Marinkovi dubbed Ujevi the Baudelaire from Vrgorec, while Ujevis nickname for Marinkovi was the Voltaire from Vis (each mans respective birthplace).

Only a few chapters in CYCLOPS feature the Ujevi-like character Maestro, but Maestros spirit and his relationship with Tresi permeate the entire novel. For all his curmudgeonly manner, Maestro has an abiding fondness for Tresi, and chooses him as the only person from their circle he can trust. Theirs is the principle emotional relationship of CYCLOPS. Another vestige of Ujevis is the mystique attached to the name Viviana, which personifies the feminine creative mystery in Ujevis poetic.

In the immediate postwar years Marinkovi was one of the rising stars in Zagreb cultural life, active in the theater and in publishing and teaching, while in the same period Ujevi was working only as a literary translator, having been banned for five years by the Writers Association from publishing his own poetry and essays punishment for accepting employment from the fascist regime as a translator during the war. Marinkovi was among those who saw to it that Ujevi always had enough translation work to support him during this time. Harold Bloom alerts us to the dynamic that often shapes relations between younger generations of writers and the powerful figures of previous generations. Ranko Marinkovi was not a poet, so he was not competing directly with Ujevis looming influence, but this dynamic is also worth keeping in mind when parsing his portrait of Ujevi in the character of Maestro.