This Space of Writing by Stephen Mitchelmore

Author:Stephen Mitchelmore [Mitchelmore, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-981-8
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2015-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

The weight of the Zone’s history dragging Mirkovic down is a reminder of Nietzsche’s essay On the Use and Abuse of History for Life that argues in favour of a history that serves life rather than binds it to memory. It’s why Mirkovic’s reading matter may prompt the accusation that the book is nothing more than a pathological indulgence in others’ misfortunes. Nietzsche resisted monumental and antiquarian forms of history, giving equal importance to forgetting in the lives of individuals, communities and cultures. Mirkovic’s nonstop narrative might then be seen as an unhealthy Schadenfreude and self-pity over what his pursuance of war and profit has cost him and others. Yet while we may take this view, we too are implicated in being provoked to prefer forgetfulness over remembrance and the repetition of history this threatens. Zone draws our attention to the web stories weave when its stream-of-consciousness is interrupted by chapters of another book that Mirkovic has in his possession. A writer called Rafael Kahla tells the story of Intissar, a Palestinian fighter resisting the Israeli onslaught in Lebanon. Her lover Marwan has been killed in a firefight and she has to carry on, rifle in hand, lamenting his death whilst remaining true to the cause in the tradition of warriors fighting for a nation’s independence. It’s a sad and dignified story written with familiar punctuation and in free indirect speech; a work of fiction within a fiction reminding the reader of the longing to make something redemptive in death that overtakes both people and novels. (In fact, Intissar’s story is very similar to From A to X, John Berger’s grossly sentimental novel celebrating the stifled lives of revolutionaries on either side of a prison wall.) However, the contrast to Mirkovic’s narrative and to the Iliad is not in its style but in its boundless pathos. Where Zone’s pages leap over rows of headless bodies and the Iliad describes violent death with swift and terrible lyricism, Intissar does not let go, wanting to retrieve Marwan from death, going so far as to risk another firefight to recover and then bathe his stiffening body.

Mirkovic’s present might be said to be one in which unresting death is faced when the attenuated husks of religious or nationalist myth have been breached. Mirkovic is the exposed core, and the choice between memory and forgetting is impossible; a brilliant future depends on both. His existence in writing – sustained, incessant, brutal, resourceful to the brink of insanity – thereby becomes necessary for survival. Everything is coursed into a recital, a unique poetic ritual of mourning to reach the destination that is itself. Zone is indeed soaked in trauma yet, in Mathias Énard’s hands and Charlotte Mandell’s fluid translation, it is exhilarating, and has to be read.

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