The Exilic Intellectual – Daša Drndić

Abstract

The article deals with the ways the Croatian author attempted to retain the memory of innocent victims. The starting point is the conviction that the author is an exilic intellectual. Her oeuvre can be divided into two phases, showing the transition from the autobiographic form to the writing on the suffering of the others (the excluded, the marginalized, the repressed). It is also worth mentioning that in the case of Drndić, her own experience of exclusion became the impulse to write about those who are situated on the margins of the society. And although Drndić graphically pinpoints that the mechanisms of stigmatizing and excluding are always the same, it is the Jews who become her main point of reference in the stories of faultless suffering and innocent victims. Following the common thesis of the inability to represent the Holocaust, the present author wonders why Drndić chose such a literary form, and then endeavors to demonstrate the correlation between the novelist’s writing strategies, the subject matter, as well as her understanding of the human being and the world. Here, the category of liminality appears vital as applied to the analyzed prose, which is then investigated using a number of different approaches (thematic, generic [fiction versus autobiography], ontological, and as a direct result of the author’s “total projects”).