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Let us see an example from 19th century Croatian literature. August
Šenoa published his first novel, The Gold of the Goldsmith (Zlatarovo
zlato) in 1871. Six years later he published another novel entitled The
Peasants’ Revolt (Seljačka buna) whose plot takes place fifteen years
earlier, whereas the characters are largely the same, and the same is valid
for the places. The novel presenets bourgeois of Grička Gorica, the
future Zagreb, landlords, peasants and serfs from neighbouring castles
and villages. In the first novel every character has his relative and particular
identity, and while there is much talk about „the love of the
fatherland” („ljubav domovine”) and „the iron wall on the doorstep
of the Christian world” („gvozden zid na pragu kršćanskoga svijeta”),
the intricate relations of these identities are summed up in an unmistakeably
Croatian world. In the second novel the characters bear a
national label on their collars. An „old Croatian heart is beating” in
every person declared to be Croatian, to such a degree that the expression
„u meni kuca staro hrvatsko srce” starts to function very early
as a zero syntagma. In spite of extensive descriptions of paysages and
rural scenes, written in a beautiful and powerful Croatian language,
the Croatian world known from the earlier novel disappears under a
greasy layer of identical identities. Since there are no real characters,
primitive intrigues keep the plot moving.
National identity is no identity at all.
Let me take then the idea of national language as bearer or substrate
of the so-called national identity. It would not be difficult – it would
be simply too long – to show that many, if not all, national languages
stem from a koiné of an imperial formation. Even if a modern national
state pretends to be the heir of a unilingual kingdom or dominion of
the past, either the very pretension is false, or else unilingualness proves
to be at best a continuum of dialects, at worst a patchwork of dialects
and linguistic remnants of a previous imperial formation. Anyway, the
language of the national state in the making has to be superposed upon
a multitude of dialects. Even if one supposes that it stems from one
of these dialects, as French from a hypothetical „Francien”, its sheer
existence already implies an equal distance and an integrative position
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