Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Sunum, ss.23, 2019
The name of the Ismet Prcic’s 2011 text, Shards, attests to a split psyche, since the persona cannot consolidate the past with the present, or experience with imagination. Structurally speaking, Shards resembles autobiographical material spotted with fiction. While the text poses as excerpts from a diary, intercepted by fiction, only very late in the text are we hit by the realisation that the fictional persona is a foil for the diarist as well, his possible doppelgänger. So what we take as the fictions of the diarist is an alternative persona, denoting what would have been if he had remained in Bosnia during the civil war. In line with Marc Nichanian’s contention that catastrophe cannot be expressed by testimonies and that art, more specifically literature has to step in, Prcic’s novel is a surprisingly poignant work of auto-fiction. As well as the fractured interiority, the choice of the title further attests to the human body physically torn into shards. The objectified body is now the defunct remains, and as such foregrounds the danger inherent in the remnants of former human-ness.
This paper proposes to offer a close reading of Ismet Prcic’s text Shards, where the objects and the materiality of the objectified take on a significance of their own. They interact, they get enmashed, pile up, are almost created afresh in the aftermath and the finitude of human agency. Yet, the split psyche of the narrator parallels the de-creation undergone by the body that is torn open in more than one way. Thus interiority is hidden behind the structural plurality induced by various narrators which slide through one another while the recurrent metaphors of the body in various stages of de-creation signify a dissolution of the same interiority.