Whose Museum? Whose History? Whose Memories? Remembering in the Work of Dubravka Ugrešić

On the first page of Dubravka Ugresic’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (2002) the narrator describes the contents found in the stomach of a walrus named Roland as exhibited at the Berlin Zoo, and suggests that we read the book in the same way we would interpret the objects found in Roland’s stomach – as a collection of random archaeological finds that at first glance lack any logical or narrative connection. In other words, we should not expect the novel to provide a well-polished, easy-to-consume chronological narrative, but should be patient and use our imagination to establish semantic connections between chapters and fragments.1 By invoking the image of a collection of artefacts found in the stomach of a walrus, the narrator introduces the trope of the museum and reminds us that, to reconstruct the past, we often have to rely on artefacts that have survived purely by chance. We have to accept that writing history – for example, the ‘life and times’ of Roland the walrus – to a large extent means not only preserving and classifying trivial artefacts (as in a museum), but also making sense of these random relics of the past. Asking us to put together the fragments of which the novel is composed, the narrator suggests that we consider the potential of literature and, as becomes clear later in the novel, of contemporary artistic practice to engage creatively with the leftovers of history – because that is what the relics of everyday life very often look like at first glance.2 From the very beginning, Ugresic’s narrator points to the role of literature as a mnemonic art – that is, as a way of collecting, preserving

Art · Work (physics · Engineering · Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Narrative Theory and Analysis

• History, memory and the everyday

  Joe Moran•Rethinking History•2004

  Add to list

• Obsessive Collectors

  Open Access•Anthony Anemone•The Russian Review•2000

  Add to list