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Basri Çapriqi
KADARE USES OLD TOpOI TO
DECOMpOSE ThE NEW MAChINERY OF
ThE WORLD DICTATORShIp
By Basri Çapriqi Kosovo
The Wooden horse
In his book “Ftesë në studio” (Invitation
to the Studio) the writer recalls: “My first
conquest, as if driven by an old impulse
of the race, was Troy. However, I went by
the city walls to do the impossible: to not
conquer.”
The conquest of Troy, the eternal
obliviousness is the greatest anxiety for
the poet from the earliest times but to not
conquer the city, to not destroy its walls
is the voice of the author that spreads
throughout almost all his work.
The analogy is drawn to resemble major
menace to states, civilizations and epochs
and at the same time to all private
relationships between people. This Troy
topos appears to us within its boundaries
that were set thousands of years ago,
within which we continue to remain
and those very boundaries continue to
determine our path, our fate and to set the
limitations of our behavior.
The writer finds genotext a symbolic
creation and the truth of that symbol a
specific truth, in which the represented
reality has no longer an absolute value
but the value lies within the blurred truth,
multiplied and eternalized. The truth
does not happen then, there is too much
fog, the truth happens now. The Trojan
horse is revealed to us in the field across
our modern city, in the concrete shape we
know and have constructed ourselves, of a
van. It is this horse ‘van’, which promotes
anxiety whenever it finds analogy within
corners of our sub-consciousness.
The Cut head
Kadare’s work is the type of fiction that
has dominated 20th century Europe. It is
the literature that creates myths. Some
of the symbols Kadare has created in his
individual works aim to represent actual
reality due to their similarities with current
events even though he sometimes risks
being interpreted by allegory. However, the
figure of the cut head is a myth-creating
figure. The cut head stature conceived
by the imagination of the author Kadare,
is an open metaphysic, a generalization,
epitomizing his views about the state,
peoples’ destiny, totalitarian systems,
passions, and the ambitions of man
confronting power etc.
The character by the name of Abdulla, the
one who arranges heads on the window
of shame (kamarja e turpit) undergoes
an interesting development. From a very
pedant bureaucrat who places severed
heads, brought from different corners of
the empire, in the window of shame, he
turns into a symbolic animal (Casirer). He
transforms into a creature with an urge
for self-execution, a desire to be alongside
those who rebel and consequently whose
heads are removed and then displayed in
the window of shame.
By awakening the wish to resemble those
cut heads in the mind of the one who
displays them in the window of shame,
the author aims to demonstrate his own
disagreement with the idea that the human
brain can be indoctrinated entirely. In the
event of any strange situation the instinct
to oppose and confront may emerge
from the hidden depths of our subconsciousness.
The Given Word (Besa)
The given word or Besa in Albanian is one
of the most sublime pieces in Kadare’s
work. Through this language masterpiece
the author has succeeded in touching
those levels that are unknown and
invisible to the rational side of the human
consciousness. It is only through this kind
of language that one can move freely from
this world into another, the transcendental,
the world beyond, with the aim of satisfying
our eternal quest, to cross that border
which limits the life of this world. It is
the power of the symbolic language that
carries the message from the conscious to
the unconscious part of the human psyche.
The premises that embrace the energy of
this language such as: imperceptibility,
irrationality, the removal of real time,
the absence of the reverent, the limitless
bounds of interpretation, the possibility
to penetrate to the endless heights of the
transcendental world, without fear that
we may lose our path in the process. It is a
known path and an articulate world within
our sub-consciousness.
The pyramid
Its greatness and the absurdity of the
motive that has pushed the human mind
to build such a monument, a grand tomb
to eternalize fame and glory as well as to
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