FORCING THE ABSURD

David Albahari: The Checkpoint (Stubovi kulture, Belgrade, 2011)

By:  Ivan Telebar

In his latest novel, The Checkpoint, David Albahari decided on a war topic set in an unusual and at the same time, purposeless story of the pointlessness of dying on the battlefield. In his attempt to shock, the author managed to achieve exactly the opposite. The one thing that will astonish the reader is the blurriness of the storytelling discourse with gaps that dominate the obvious plot and the hypothetical point of the text. The war is set as an unconditional situation, but the absurd that the author wanted to create poisoned his writing and left us with a bitter aftertaste.

Death and tittle-tattle

For the topic, Albahari does not take the war as a whole, but describes the horrors of a war at a metonymical distance which is presented by a troop of soldiers on a checkpoint. Even the characters themselves do not know where they are and what their tasks are. There is not a single soul in the surroundings of the checkpoint they control and the only thing left for the military unit of 37 men to do is to work on self-preservation. The absurd leisure filled with trained military rituals is shattered by a mysterious death of one of the deserters. At that moment, the novel falls into quicksand from which it will not be able to get out of until the end. One after the other, the soldiers are attacked, they disappear or get murdered. The crescendo of death continuous with immigrants’ transits, the only purposeful event at the checkpoint, and culminates in an enemy invasion. Death has not spared any of the checkpoint guards, except for the Commandant, who, thanks to his newly discovered skill of napping in the treetops, manages to survive and discover the cause of death of his soldiers.

The central storytelling entity is set among the solders, who are all anonymous (with the exception of Mladen, Dragan and Marko) and represent one uniformed collective that is controlled by the (also anonymous) Commandant. His character is also portrayed by inner monologues that keep cutting into the story and destroying the narrative flow. Wild changes in focus make us keep trying to follow the story, even though we only find it lacking in logic. The storyteller is an unidentified voice from the unit, but when the whole unit dies at the end, whose eyes are observing and describing the Commandant’s struggle for salvation? Albahari does not explain this, and the narrative instance gets lost in its own schizophrenia.

Commandant’s indecision between the authority that comes with his title and his poetic daydreaming, is louder than the horror of death happening in front of him. His contemplations (on death, about the soul, afterlife and absence) are sometimes in accordance with the scenes he witnesses, and sometimes they are banal, providing a contrast to the scenes of horror (the secret of language, the kangaroos, the sunflower seeds). With this, intentionally or not, the suffering that the author tries to portray is treated as relative. Death is less serious when it is standing next to a kangaroo.

Everything that happens around the checkpoint is a dark mystery. Who is the enemy? Who are ‘’we’’ and who are ‘’they’’? What separates the ramp they are guarding? – these questions are left in the air, we can only guess the context (if it matters), although the situation ‘’when the victorious and the defeated party speak the same language’’ reminds us of the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, and the title of the novel alludes to the present political situation in Serbia. If Albahari really wanted to set his story in this frame, what should we do with the numerous other indications of a completely different explanation? In the text, the war is said to be the beginning of the end of the united Europe and the enemy is marked by his language – the radio is first in some foreign language and later in Check, and in the end, the parties at war speak ‘’our’’ mutual language. We can not find a strong basis in all of this confusion, which does not give us a possibility for a clear explanation.

The tragic comedy of dying

Between Commandant’s daydreaming and constant decline in the number of living soldiers, there is room for many odd and astonishing scenes. Delivery of a parcel despite not knowing anything about it, orgies under the romantic light of the signal grenades or the soft smile of the Commandant by which he ‘’condemns’’ the raping of the interpreter, are but a few of the grotesque scenes Albahari uses to stop the merciless continuation of death. We can also add the elements of pop culture, from evergreens to the sci-fi quotes, by which Albahari wants to emphasise the dehumanisation as a natural reflex in this chaos, showing war as a situation in which a dead animal corpse can be more shocking than a chopped-up human body. These scenes may shock a few readers but they do not have a purpose in the context of the novel. They are not connected to the plot in any way and death would have been just as real without them.

Albahari is not only interested in the direct experience of war but in the experience of war in the mass media. In an attempt to question the war as a daily source of breaking news, he inserts two fantastical scenes of Commandant’s encounter with the press. If we leave out the fact that they are a hallucinogen product of Commandant’s consciousness, the point of view from which the media perceives the war is very intriguing and it deserves a few more lines.

The novel seems as a homemade psychoactive piece. Written without a pause, without any whiteness on which to rest our eyes on, with a narration exhausted with monologues, the text is in a position to astonish its reader. The reader feels the delirium in which the novel was written in. In this non-stop flow of words, the dialogues are hidden, which is very symbolic in understanding the real situation of war which this text describes. Albahari has written an anti-war novel, but what is his real message? Is it the Commandant’s conclusion that war is ‘’crap’’ and that it is ‘’pointless’’? Did we not know this before? Maybe it is a test of humanity in an extremely inhuman situation, or a test of boundaries of the survival instinct. If so, it is pointless to try out such a test with an outcome that is already known. Thrown in the middle of their own nightmares, Albahari’s soldiers never got the chance to be human.