In a seminal scene from the 1989 film Dead Poets Society, the character of Professor John Keating, famously played by Robin Williams, asks one of his students to read a paragraph entitled “Understanding Poetry” off a (fictitious) handbook of literature. The student diligently abides and so the class discovers that, according to the book’s author, the value of a poem may be scientifically pinned down by the means of a graph measuring its poetic rendition and the importance of its topic. Once the reading is over, Keating orders all the students, much to their astonishment, to tear up the page containing this theory from their books.
This scene serves well as powerful reminder to the scholarly world of the risks of dramatically missing the point when too strict theories are applied to the study of humanities. On the other hand, a total lack of methodology inevitably leads to some very arbitrary and self-explanatory conclusions, as we have already seen in the case of Curtis’ ill-fated attempt at forcefully conciliating Njegoš’s and Fishta’s worldviews, as he indulges way too much into his own ideological agenda.1 And a solid yet flexible methodology is what we will look for in the next pages in order to compare Albanian and South Slavic national epic poems.
Why Compare?
The comparative approach has a long and respected lineage in historical studies, tracing back to the pioneering work of Marc Bloch (1886-1944).2 Despite the
1 See above, 12-13.
2 For his elaboration of the comparative method see Marc Bloch, “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes” [For a Comparative History of European Societies], in Revue de synthèse historique, LXVI (1928), 15-20. See also William H. Sewell Jr., “Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History”, in History and Theory, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1967), 208-218.
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emergence of new methodologies aiming at overcoming its limits,3 comparative research remains a powerful tool in the hands of historians. Such a tool may give great results when it comes to the Albanian and South Slavic epic nation building processes:
Two very close linguistic and cultural environments which received and elaborated in their own specific way the cultural and political trends coming from Western Europe, and in which cultural activists used epos as a vehicle for their cultural and political views almost naturally lend themselves to a comparative study. Much certainly, the dissemination of the national idea, including in its epic form, is a phenomenon which may only be tracked town by the means of an entangled, croisée approach to European history – approach which has been vastly used in the analysis of the birth and development of national epos in the first half of this dissertation. However, what may and shall go through an actual comparative analysis is the aftermath of this process, i.e. the cultivation of the national idea once embedded in different national contexts.
The reason why Albanian and South Slavic national epics make for such a terrific comparative case-study is that they perfectly match what Heinz-Gerhard Haupt identifies as the heuristic, the contrastive, the analytical, and the distancing functions of historical comparison:4 Heuristic, as comparison will bring up new data and explanations concerning the use of national epos in Albanian and Serbo-Croatian speaking environments; contrastive, as it will help pinning down the distinctive features of each different epic national narratives; analytical, as it will prompt to
3 Most notably its nation-state oriented approach, which admittedly becomes a hindrance rather than an asset when it comes to study intra-national, entangled phenomena and dynamics. See Philipp Ther,
“Beyond the Nation: The Relational Basis of a Comparative History of Germany and Europe”, in Central European History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2003), 5-73.
4 Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “Comparative History”, in Neil J. Smelser et Paul B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Amsterdam et al.: Brill, 2001), vol. 4, 2397–2403.
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investigate the causes of the specific Albanian and South Slavic situations; distancing, as it will provide an inedited point of view on two realities which very rarely have been studied together before.
Before moving on, I want to make clear that it is not in the interest of this study to provide an aesthetic evaluation of the epics. This is not to say that forms are not important, far from it: As we have already seen before,5 the choice to use epic literature to convey a nationalist message was directly connected, among the other factors, to the aesthetic features of epos. However, even though forms are not taken completely out of the picture, we shall not venture into any kind of the aesthetic judgement.
The Tripod Model
The way I intend to compare the national epics of Albanians and South Slavs is by the means of a model, which I would like to call “the Tripod Model”, based on three elements, three “benchmarks” of cultural nationalism whose treatment in these poems I intend to track, unfold, and compare: Kinship, religion, and patriotism.
The idea of analysing common features of different national epics is based on Anthony Smith’s search for “the fundamental features of national identity”6 combined with Miroslav Hroch’s A-B-C model for classifying cultural nationalist movements among emerging nations.7 While Smith’s selection of a nation’s fundamental features might be objected,8 the idea of pinning down those elements which, in the course of
5 See above, 70.
6 Smith, National Identity, 14.
7 See above, 29-30.
8 More specifically, Smith’s features are: An historical territory, or homeland; common myths and historical memories; a common, mass public culture; common legal rights and duties for all members; a common economy with territorial mobility for members. National Identity, 14.
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history, have acted as catalyst of national identities works well in the framework of cultural nationalism – and particularly well in a study on national epics. I have therefore decided to merge Smith’s somewhat taxonomic approach with Hroch’s structuralist and comparativist one, for this will allow the research to range over different epic representations of the nation within the framework of a solid, methodologically-grounded theory.
Granted, the Tripod Model is not without its disadvantages either, the biggest one possibly being the risk of overlooking potentially relevant information which do not fall under the scrutiny of the model, therefore providing a somewhat distorted picture of the situation. This, on the other hand, is admittedly the downside of every structuralist approach.
Kinship
The element of kinship intends to investigate whether or not a writer of national epic regards common ancestry, cultural heritage, and blood communality as a founding element of national identity. This does not of course mean that we are going to blindly accept ahistorical statements on mythical lineages or national foundations as real, nor that this research supports ethnic/racial nationalistic agenda by any stretch of the imagination, but that we are going to explore if and to which extent this element plays a role in a specific epic national representation.
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Religion
In his Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson maintained that nationalism emerged at the expenses of what were previously the two dominant cultural systems which shaped human society, i.e. dynastic realms and religious communities.9 Without necessarily disproving this assumption, one may easily see how history has eventually experienced many instances of nationalisms which have been propelled, among the many factors, by religion too. Christianity in the Balkans is a perfect example thereof:
While on the one hand Paul explicitly stated, while writing to the Galatians, that
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus”,10 Balkan Christians have experienced national divisions reinforced by confessional differences (as in the case of Croats and Serbs) or by political conflicts within the same confession (as in the case of the emergence of Bulgarian, Greek and Serbian national Orthodox Churches independent from and at times in contraposition with the Patriarchs of Constantinople in the nineteenth century). Therefore, it will be profitable to analyse how the Balkan composers of national epics have dealt with religion in relation to their national projects.
9 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 9-36.
10 Gal 3, 28.
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Patriotism
Patriotism is what Anderson brilliantly defined as “political love”, the “attachment that peoples feel for the inventions of their imaginations”.11 This is a phenomenon which European cultures have knowledge of since antiquity: The attachment to a homeland, to a patria, to a Heimat regardless of one’s ethnic, linguistic, or religious background.12 Patriotism is part and parcel of political nationalism, but does it perform a similarly pivotal role in the epic nation building of Albanian and South Slavic cultural activists? The Tripod Model shall help us finding an answer to this question too.
Some Honourable Mentions
Before moving on to the comparative analysis, it is worth briefly scrutinising some of those parameters which have been taken into account as elements of the Tripod model but, for reasons I will get into, have been eventually dismissed.
“Territory” was for a long time a valuable candidate for this comparative study.
Territorial belonging is, after all, a chief characteristic of nationalist narratives, be them cultural or not. But this is exactly the reason why territory has been eventually written out: nationalism without territory, in my opinion, is not real nationalism – not in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century anyway, and most certainly not in the case of Albanian, Croatian and Serbian national movements. The presence of a cultural and/or political motherland is ubiquitous among nationalistic movements,
11 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 143 and 141. One shall never forget that “inventions” and
“imaginations” are not derogatory terms for Anderson, but they simply reflect the constructed nature of identities and communities.
12 Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism.
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therefore making “territory” an element of little use for a comparative study aiming at bringing up differences and similarities alike. If nationalism were an equation,
“territory” would be its given variable.
“Culture” too was another potential entry in the model. Unfortunately, culture is too vague of a term to properly serve as a term of comparison for such a research, for it is extremely hard to find a consensus on the actual meaning of this word: Some would actually claim that history, kinship, language, and religion are already cultural constructs, whereas others would regard culture as a more literary and/or sociological and/or anthropological phenomenon.13 Far from wanting to debunk these interpretations – each of them correct in their own way – I just maintain that “culture”
would have not worked as yardstick for comparison between national narratives.
“History” has been for a long time a constitutive element of the model before having been eventually dismissed. Its demise has been caused by the realisation that, much like “territory”, the presence of the past is already a given when it comes to epic national narratives. All national epic poems deal with the past, be it recent or remote, and this or that nation is regarded as the final product of this past. The very idea of epic nation building as an attempt at national poetic history testifies the preeminent role naturally history has in every national epic poem – a fact which has eventually worked against its inclusion in the model.
Last but not least, “memory” was also a suitable candidate as a comparative benchmark. Competing lieux de mémoire14 are part and parcel of national narratives, be them eventful locations (e.g. Kosovo, in the Serbian case), lost cities or territories
13 For general reference see Chris Jenks (ed.), Culture: Critical Concepts in Sociology, 4 Vols.
(London: Routledge, 2003).
14 See Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire [Realms of Memory], 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-1986).
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(e.g. Constantinople and Asia Minor for the Greeks,15 or the Balkan peninsula for many Turkish literates16) and so on.17 However, much like the aborted “history”
category, I have also decided not to have a separate “memory” category in my model on the basis of the fact that all epic national narratives already rely on the concept of memory due to their nature of attempts at a collective, national poetic history.
15 See Peter Mackridge, “The Myth of Asia Minor in Greek Fiction”, in Renée Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (New York & Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), 235-45.
16 See Aytül Tamer Torun, “The Balkan Imagination of Balkan-Origin Intellectuals: From Ottomanism to Nationalism”, in Dimitris Stamatopoulos (ed.), Balkan Nationalism(s) and the Ottoman Empire, Vol.
1 (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2015), 251-266.
17 Granted, competing literary memories of cities and territories may develop beyond clear-cut national narratives, see on this point Tanya Zaharchenko, Where Currents Meet: Frontiers in Post-Soviet Fiction of Kharkiv, Ukraine (Budapest & New York: Central European University Press, 2015).
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CHAPTER 6: COMPARING ALBANIAN AND SOUTH SLAVIC NATIONAL