THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL

Mirjana Novaković: Tito has Died (Laguna, Belgrade, 2011)

By: Lamija Neimarlija

The main character in Mirjana Novaković’s thriller ‘’Tito has Died’’ (Laguna, 2011) is a dissident alcoholic, a well know journalist of a newspaper Politika, during the previous regime and a marginalised reporter in today’s capitalist Serbia. The novel begins with our hero/storyteller’s unexpected conversation with a communist Nikola Babić, in which she finds out that one number of Politika from 1968, published a very unusual article, in which, the first capital letter of each paragraph reads ‘’Tito has Died’’. The text tells of a theatre play that will start on May 4 at 3.05 p.m. The death of Tito – the great event of the Yugoslavian history – is not the only mystery in this crime story. The tragic death of one of the most perspective members of the Democratic party, Saša Vrtača, is a mystery of a great importance to the Serbian authority and its nation.

To achieve the tension of a thriller, these two events have to have a complicated connection of mutual enlightening, which would make them more clear, and as two combined secrets – more mysterious. Instead, the setting of two secrets in a single sense of progression (getting to the bottom of the mystery) is attempted from the main character’s relationship with other characters and the connection is created by an unusual coincidence, frequently found in more trivial literature: The stupid people see less and the crazy people more than is good for them. Nothing happens to me in months and then suddenly two incredible things happen and I can not pretend not to see that the story of Tito’s death and the invitation to a Conference seem connected. Both persons involved are old communists, the first one revealed to me the announcement of Tito’s death in the Politika in 196. and the other one invited me to this Conference. First-person storytelling, e.g. ‘’inner’’ narration flow, ‘’kills’’ the story that should be the basis for a thriller.

Naughty capitalism

The tension, the basic part of a thriller, and what should come out of a complicated structure of interlinked secret actions, is compensated by scenes of discussions, dialogues with other characters that know a bit more about the crime. Through discussions and conversations of our hero, the representative of lost justice, with characters, representatives of certain parts of the society (a member of the Democratic party, a gold-digger, an old communist, corporate owners etc.), we are offered an overview of the capitalist Serbian society. The rule of a thriller, the constant repetition of the same characters – their role in the plot, has a purpose of emphasising the differences on which the picture of the world in the novel is based on; it is in the service of a scheme of condemning the norms of capitalism and confirming the values of socialism. With this, the writer’s social engagement ends. The plan of conflict of good and evil, of power and weakness, does not overcome this trivial scheme.

The story, better to say, the sequence of events gets lost, because the storytelling often switches into rationalisation and psychological analysis. Chapters that contain monologues, in which the main hero gives her comment on the conversation, in which, based on new data, she reconstructs the mystery, or contemplates the life conditions in Serbia then and now, become stylistic virtuosities. The concentration on storytelling switches the interest from structure to style, by the mere definition, e.g. from the plot to the word. For example, the hero/storyteller’s monologue is often marked by a rhetorical question as a correction in the text – a means for developing thoughts and argumentation. Her writing has style and is marked with long descriptions, piling up, accumulationtion: I woke up at 4 a.m and could not go back to sleep, the alcohol always made me fall asleep first and then woke me up too soon, I was not very sober, but the peak state of drunkenness was gone, and I was in a bad mood, I was trying to think, (…) I asked myself in my dream, does Zuzana know that the more I get to know capitalism, the more I admire communism, and what else does Zuzana know about me? And then I woke up, with a hangover and sad, I knew I was not crying, but it felt like I was, it all came together, I thought, it all came together, not in one place, but in a place the size of a universe, and what can anyone do against the universe?

The clash with the naughty capitalism

In this way she achieves the reference of an illusion – an illusion of a real world – the truth of the story and the expressed ‘’I’’ of the main character, who values and notices other characters: Zuzana presents the marginalised group, a victim of physical and psychological violence in the ruling capitalist regime; Seka is a stupid gold-digger, a great believer and a victim of violence of the capitalist mafia; Mara Babić, a communist involved in the crimes, but the only one that is ‘’a person and a human’’, Dubravka Kovačević, a scrupulous capitalist, who allows her husband to cheat on her etc. The lack of expression is replaced by differences. Such is the description, for an example, of Mara Babić and her daughter Dubravka Kovačević. Mara is described as the opposite of Dubravka:… She says what she thinks and does not give a fuck about anyone and she would never wear a fur-coat, whether it is minus twenty outside or she is being expected in high society with their fur-coats on. If she caught her husband cheating on her, she would divorce him or slap him unconscious, but would never ask him to stay with her as her constant source of profit. Unlike a crime story, where each aspect of an action has to be in the service of the mystery, in this novel the storyteller’s point of view comes first. In this way, the structure of a crime novel has been used as precise political and ideological propaganda.

The most important ideological message of the novel is the clash with the ruling liberal capitalism in Serbia. It is a message of craving for the happy life, for the ideal we can never go back to, or, as Mirjana Novaković writes, we can not go back to socialism, we can not go back to our youth, we can not go back to our fist months of romance, we can not go back to our child-like joy, we can not go back to the happy past… The ideal is not to be found in the future, so it should be replaced by revenge – revealing the truth about the new, evil world. The triumph of evil at the end of the novel shows that the purpose of a crime story is not moral satisfaction, but a recognition of an ‘’infected’’, rotten society of the capitalistic Serbia…