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oppress and diminish all human creatures
of the country, has touched Kadare’s
imagination, in the sense of creating a
hidden analogy.
A grand pyramid, - a grand tomb, which
was going to be built in order to make
people look small and insignificant, and
more importantly to destroy social well
being and to declare poverty as a constant
condition of all generations - was being
built in Tirana whilst the dictator was
still alive. An Albanian community in the
second half of the 20th century, turned
into a social tomb, resembles so closely
the absurd endeavor of building a huge
tomb of a pharaoh as well as the early
Egyptian idea to turn a tomb into a symbol
of representation through centuries.
The figure of this tomb bears such a
resemblance to an empirical reality, it
drops down almost to the very bottom, only
to be dissolved as an allegory, because it
clearly touches the time limits as well as
space limits of this reality.?? The pharaoh
tomb is brought close to the cemetery
of politics and community of Albania. It
borders on a parable , and it touches it but
it does not cross over it therefore it never
leaves space to be turned into a logical
denotation –very hard for me to understand
what the author is trying to say in the
above paragraph. By disregarding time
and space, the author remains faithful to
his own style, he transforms the text into a
driving force for generalization by bringing
social and referential sites of his own time
whilst simultaneously raising matters of
global interest to humans of all eras..
The author is very much interested not
only in establishing connections between
entirely mythical times and the objective
time of history, but at the same time he
creates links between the ideas and aims
of the characters he shapes on the basis
of fundamental resemblance. The text
highlights the starkness of the absurdity
from mythical times of pyramid building,
as a ritual after so many centuries that is
being recycled in the 20th century; when
in Tirana a pyramid is being built for the
dictator. The very idea that a tomb must
become a symbol to represent power
carries all the burden of the morbidity of
the dictatorship.
Through pyramid, Kadare has succeeded
in forging a link between the times and the
initiation of the insanity and absurdity. The
dictators’ idea to build a tomb becomes a
symbol of all dictatorships, both ancient
and new, whether in the east or west.
Only the actual building materials can
be differentiated whether stone, human
skulls, or glass, all pyramids communicate
in one language only, the language of the
desert they sow, the waste they leave
behind to shine for the future.
The Evil Eye
The alienation of the human in totalitarian
systems is enclosed in irony. The brain
washed or blinded individual expresses
great pleasure because he no longer
clearly sees the world. . He proclaims
darkness as light and declares the eyes a
useless organ that troubles ones head. It
is an irony of the platforms and policies of
totalitarian ideology.
The evil eye, the eradication of the evil
eye, the dangerous eye for the state, the
dangerous poets and their implications,
the wish to be blinded driven by the will
to act for the benefit of the state, the
announcement that eyes are harmful to
the head, the hypocrisy of amnesty for
the massacred, are all associations that
resemble phenomena of the Albanian
dictatorial system in the second half of the
20th century.
The Immurement
Ismail Kadare has examined this topos,
which has never been wholly explained,
not to reveal it, but to bestow new and
deeper meaning. The conflict that the
author tackles through the mystery of
wall construction during all his work, by
confronting it with the logical argument
and the interpretation based on empirical
causes further increases the semantic
confusion. The symbolic strategy of the
suggestive language that strives for the
unspeakable, that leaves the mystery
unsolved and intensifies the interpretive
game, triumphs every time over logical
arguments which are jumbled in order
to explain the phenomenon. The means
of language can be sharpened to provide
reasons of destruction to its foundation..
The reader, who seeks deeper meanings,
transpires in his own cultural memory, in
the inherited paradigms brought to him
from bygone generations to discover the
code of communication. The milk that runs
in the soil and the nipple that emerges
from the baby’s mouth, whilst we see the
human creature with limbs embedded into
the wall, in front of so many men, conveys
a multifaceted complex meaning. It carries
all the tragedy, the absurdity and cruelty,
death and the continuation of life, the
sadness and indifference, deceit and trust,
the entire philosophy of life and perhaps
all the moral, ethical and philosophical
foundations upon which the course of
human development is based.
The Eagle
Ismail Kadare has built an entire universe
of mythical symbols, walls, pyramids,
castles, wooden horses etc, with the aim of
fortifying the ethnicity and to enclose the
circle at the end, to come along with totality
of all wars and all battles human mind has
created, he takes the most precious symbol
from the flag and combats the bloody war
with its bird, the one he is identified with,
the eagle of the flag.
The symbol of the eagle is built upon
an antithetic conception: “the eagle is
your savior; the eagle is your murderer.”
This antithetic involvement is easy to
convey from textual antithesis into
other antithetic situations and relations
that derive from this, be they of social,
political or psychological nature and
to spread immediately throughout the
globe: “Perhaps the entire human race
was imprisoned in these corners of the
universe, handcuffed, who knows why,
by a self-destructive desire.”
The escape of a man on the back of an
eagle is an unusual motif to reveal one
dimension among many of the tragic
that has followed this individual in his
attempt to escape the isolation. Unable
to break the wall of physical isolation
the individual has employed the great
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