Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "myth"
Dubravka Ugresic's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg
Dubravka Ugresic’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (trans. from Serbo-Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson, Grove Press, 2011) retells the Slavic myth of Baba Yaga (literally “old woman”) as a modern (or postmodern) story about old age and women. The book’s first section is devoted to the narrator’s relationship with her aged mother; the second tells the story of three old women, Pupa, Beba and Kukla, framed within the setting of a luxurious spa in post-communist Czech Republic; and the third is a sort of deconstruction or a “fairytale turned inside-out” of the previous section, penned in the form of a study by a specialist in folklore (Aba Bagay, an obvious anagram of Baba Yaga).
As a former East European who has been fascinated by the American obsession with youth, the preservation of the body, and the myth of immortality—all of which are reflected in the fitness culture on the one hand and the pop mythology built around the myth of Dracula on the other—I read with passion Ugresic’s meditation on all these themes via what appears to be a story at the spa. The spa itself (or its older version, the sanatorium) is one of the most fecund loci in early 20th-century European literature: think of Thomas Mann, to mention only the most famous name. But Ugresic, who is well aware of her predecessors (she herself mentions several writers who have chosen the spa as their setting, among them Milan Kundera), uses it in order to illuminate contemporary mores and obsessions, associating this “healing spring” with the myth of the fountain of youth, and creating a funny satire of the industries centered around the body (vitamin industry, cosmetic surgery, etc.) with their “physics and metaphysics” that reflect an “archetypal dream” of humanity and the “fundamental obsession of our age” with youth and the body.
Structurally, the book’s second section follows the flow of fairytales in that each chapter ends with a rhymed zinger in which the storyteller intervenes to remind us that this is, after all, only a story, and occasionally to comment on the story itself: “What about us? While life may land us in a dreadful plight, the tale speeds to be home in daylight.” This is a translation challenge, as folk and fairytale rhymed zingers are so ingrained in us in that unique form that any translation would sound fake; it is hard to tell whether Ugresic uses here “authentic” zingers from tales she has read as a child—which could never sound “authentic” for an English-speaking reader—or whether she actually invents them (my guess would be the latter).
Lovers of myth, folklore, and anthropology will relish the third section, a hundred-page study of the myth of Baba Yaga, in spite of the fact that one is not entirely sure how to read it in relation to the rest of the novel—an ambiguity the author probably intends. The folklorist Aba Bagay gives us here a mythological (and occasionally psychoanalytical and feminist) interpretation of the story we have just read in the book’s second section. This interpretation is not simply a general reading of “what happens” in the story: it is a symbolic reading of various scenes, sometimes down to the most trivial and apparently inconspicuous (“camouflaged”) details (for example, a little girl’s playful motion to step inside a big boot is compared to a regression into the maternal womb).
Whether Ugresic uses her skills developed while working as a researcher at the Institute for Theory of Literature at Zagreb University in order to make fun of Aba Bagay’s pedantic knowledge and pretentious interpretation, as some American reviewers have opined, is open to debate. While it is obvious that the author has an ironic distance toward Aba Bagay, it would be hard to say that she entirely dismisses her, since the facts presented in the third section are not invented but describe the history and the specialized literature pertaining to this myth, and are verifiable. The question is: how seriously does Ugresic take the folklorist’s interpretation of the second section (especially since she tells us in the first section that she dislikes specialists in folklore)? Is Aba Bagay the opposite of Baba Yaga (as the order of the letters y-a-g-a-b-a-b-a might suggest), or, on the contrary, is she a Baba Yaga herself who turns the myth upside down or inside out? It seems to me Aba Bagay is here merely a pretext (or a post-text) that Ugresic uses in order to give us the “facts” of the myth.
On the other hand, it is evident that Ugresic intended to rewrite the myth from a feminist perspective. The difference in perception triggered by the third section may be caused by the caesura between Aba Bagay’s symbolic logic and the feminist perspective, which belong to two different worldviews, insofar as symbolic logic attempts to find some kind of hidden, universal meaning behind a particular situation. It will be interesting to see the kinds of reading this book will inspire. It is the type of book that can be open to multiple interpretations because it unites within the same space mythological and postmodern thinking. As Susan Sontag has said, Ugresic is “a writer to follow, a writer to be cherished.”
As a former East European who has been fascinated by the American obsession with youth, the preservation of the body, and the myth of immortality—all of which are reflected in the fitness culture on the one hand and the pop mythology built around the myth of Dracula on the other—I read with passion Ugresic’s meditation on all these themes via what appears to be a story at the spa. The spa itself (or its older version, the sanatorium) is one of the most fecund loci in early 20th-century European literature: think of Thomas Mann, to mention only the most famous name. But Ugresic, who is well aware of her predecessors (she herself mentions several writers who have chosen the spa as their setting, among them Milan Kundera), uses it in order to illuminate contemporary mores and obsessions, associating this “healing spring” with the myth of the fountain of youth, and creating a funny satire of the industries centered around the body (vitamin industry, cosmetic surgery, etc.) with their “physics and metaphysics” that reflect an “archetypal dream” of humanity and the “fundamental obsession of our age” with youth and the body.
Structurally, the book’s second section follows the flow of fairytales in that each chapter ends with a rhymed zinger in which the storyteller intervenes to remind us that this is, after all, only a story, and occasionally to comment on the story itself: “What about us? While life may land us in a dreadful plight, the tale speeds to be home in daylight.” This is a translation challenge, as folk and fairytale rhymed zingers are so ingrained in us in that unique form that any translation would sound fake; it is hard to tell whether Ugresic uses here “authentic” zingers from tales she has read as a child—which could never sound “authentic” for an English-speaking reader—or whether she actually invents them (my guess would be the latter).
Lovers of myth, folklore, and anthropology will relish the third section, a hundred-page study of the myth of Baba Yaga, in spite of the fact that one is not entirely sure how to read it in relation to the rest of the novel—an ambiguity the author probably intends. The folklorist Aba Bagay gives us here a mythological (and occasionally psychoanalytical and feminist) interpretation of the story we have just read in the book’s second section. This interpretation is not simply a general reading of “what happens” in the story: it is a symbolic reading of various scenes, sometimes down to the most trivial and apparently inconspicuous (“camouflaged”) details (for example, a little girl’s playful motion to step inside a big boot is compared to a regression into the maternal womb).
Whether Ugresic uses her skills developed while working as a researcher at the Institute for Theory of Literature at Zagreb University in order to make fun of Aba Bagay’s pedantic knowledge and pretentious interpretation, as some American reviewers have opined, is open to debate. While it is obvious that the author has an ironic distance toward Aba Bagay, it would be hard to say that she entirely dismisses her, since the facts presented in the third section are not invented but describe the history and the specialized literature pertaining to this myth, and are verifiable. The question is: how seriously does Ugresic take the folklorist’s interpretation of the second section (especially since she tells us in the first section that she dislikes specialists in folklore)? Is Aba Bagay the opposite of Baba Yaga (as the order of the letters y-a-g-a-b-a-b-a might suggest), or, on the contrary, is she a Baba Yaga herself who turns the myth upside down or inside out? It seems to me Aba Bagay is here merely a pretext (or a post-text) that Ugresic uses in order to give us the “facts” of the myth.
On the other hand, it is evident that Ugresic intended to rewrite the myth from a feminist perspective. The difference in perception triggered by the third section may be caused by the caesura between Aba Bagay’s symbolic logic and the feminist perspective, which belong to two different worldviews, insofar as symbolic logic attempts to find some kind of hidden, universal meaning behind a particular situation. It will be interesting to see the kinds of reading this book will inspire. It is the type of book that can be open to multiple interpretations because it unites within the same space mythological and postmodern thinking. As Susan Sontag has said, Ugresic is “a writer to follow, a writer to be cherished.”
Notes on Books
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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