Ivo Andrić: Against National Mythopoesis

Abstract

The national narrative spun around Ivo Andrić has held firm in both academic circles and popular imagination, despite several comprehensive attempts at correcting appropriations of his oeuvre for national narratives. This article critiques nationalist readings of Andrić by showing how in his most famous novel, The Bridge on the Drina, key passages most often associated with nationalist appropriation speak against rather than for national mythopoesis. Antić does so by re-focusing on the literary rather than historiographic reading of the novel, which is to say, by analyzing narrative strategies that illuminate Andrić’s resistance to nineteenth-century romantic nationalism. In particular, Antić focuses on the scene of Radisav's impalement in order to unravel its many misinterpretations, from those that see in this scene the portrayal of Serbian national victimization and thus a justification for the 1990s genocidal war, to the ones that stay within the fictional text but still overlook ways in which Andrić qualifies the mythical/epic view of Radisav's execution. Antić shows instead that Andrić uses this scene, among others in this novel, to disrupt epic narrative models that underwrite much of South Slavic national invention of tradition, and thus challenge rather than affirm national(istic) models of Bosnian history.