Photo/graphic Traces in Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

Abstract

In Dubravka Ugresic’s novel, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender,¹ the reader ‘enters’ the text through a photograph, the single photograph of the text: in different editions this can be found either on the cover or on the first page of the book. What follows is a disjointed archive, the first person narrative of a female Croatian intellectual in exile after the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, a memory-work about a dismembered cultural, historical and geographical ‘body’, about personal and collective pasts.² Ugresic herself retells in an essay³ the story of Simonides, the ‘inventor of memory’ from Cicero’s De oratore: during a banquet the hall collapsed on the guests, disfiguring their bodies. Only Simonides was able to identify, to re-member the unrecognizable fragments by using space as a mnemo-technical strategy, remembering where the guests had sat at the table. Ugresic’s novel itself seems to work as a somewhat Simonidesian experiment, often appropriating photography, albums, collage, film, cards as ‘mnemonic’, (re)mediating strategies for remembering the dismembered body of the past, which appears not as something to be accessed but as something to be (re)constructed, (re)assembled, interrogated. The wrecks of/from the past are recollected in a text that remains unsettlingly dissected, traversed by white lines of interruption. In this process, photography is not primarily relevant as a document, as an indexical evidence of/from the past (being often connected to oblivion⁴ and to questionable referentiality), but as an intermedial modality to frame, thematize and/or critically reflect on identity, on the representability of personal and historical past, on remembrance and forgetting, on what Ricoeur would call ‘the enigma of memory as presence of the absent encountered previously’.⁵