MEDITERRANEAN WINTERS: MERGING OF IDENTITY AND OTHERNESS

Abstract

Comparing the summer and winter Mediterranean, Ivo Andrić arrives at exceptionally compelling narrative solutions. Considered from the outside, these are two completely different images. Even the very stage, the centre of the action, seems not to be the same, despite having the same name. Winter is a soft aquarelle, summer an explosion of light and a hymn to the sun. However, the real meaning of the narrative process is shown above all in the uniqueness of Andrić’s discourse. The narrative and artistic approaches in both cases – despite being distinct in topic and motive – are stylistically and methodologically so convergent that details, events, even literary characters merge and overlap amongst themselves in the same way. Neither in summer nor in winter are they sharply delineated against the remaining reality; rather “it all crosses over into the other, merges, and flow”, as the writer says himself. In the same fashion, Andrić’s narrative strategy shies away from making sharp boundaries between the identity and narration of the extradiegetic narrator, i.e. between the individual identity and otherness. For if the individual conscience is not reduced to a purely psychological conscience, and if it is simultaneously a social, cultural, and ideological conscience, then its rapport with life choices cannot be considered only as a form of an individual, psychological identification. Before becoming a cause for identification (with itself, as Otherness), Andrić’s story is fundamentally a cause of a wider cultural and ideological recognition. Which, ultimately, was the objective of Andrić’s late-in-life escape to the other, Mediterranean ambiance.