Last night, Trg poesnika in Budva hosted the writer Filip Grbić, who presented his latest novel, the third in a row, entitled "The Canon of the Depressed Mind". This continued the literary program of the XXXVIII Grad Teatar festival, and the moderator of the evening was Igor Perišić, literary theorist and literary critic.
At the beginning of the evening, Grbić said that he was happy to be back at Poets' Square after six years.
"There is probably no more pleasant place to talk about literature for a writer from Belgrade than Budva, and this very place. I am not saying this for conventional reasons, but I am sincerely looking forward to being here with you again. The previous guest appearance remained in my fond memory."
When asked by Perišić whether writing is an attempt to respond to the state of mind of the modern world, Grbić compared himself to haruspeks.
"In the Roman religion there were haruspexes, priests who cut the entrails of birds in order to predict the future of Rome, according to the way the organs are arranged. I will not flatter myself or pretend to be a prophet, but there is something common in the way I understand the work in prose, especially in the writing of novels. As a Roman haruspex, I don't know how successfully, I try to unload the guts of modernity, to understand it, in order to find out what we, as modern people, have been given," Grbić pointed out, adding that he feels a poetic obligation and legitimization to write about moment of your own life.
"Fyodor Dostoevsky ends his penultimate novel 'The Young Man' with the words that if a writer wants to write about modernity, he must guess and make mistakes. I took it as my own obligation. When I write, I am bound to guess, and I probably miss and make mistakes a lot, but I guess I guess sometimes. I don't want to write historical novels that provide the author with a kind of pleasant breeze. The author can hide behind historical plots and structure, which is a safe position for the writer. There is a much greater risk of guessing and making mistakes, but the excitement and satisfaction in the creative process is then incomparably greater."
Grbić graduated in philosophy from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade. When asked what he managed to say in literature that he couldn't in philosophy, he said that he was looking for an answer to that question himself.
"It is uncomfortable to talk about this relationship between philosophy and literature. On the one hand, they seem to be two different paths to the same goal. If we set grasping the truth about existence as a goal, then literature achieves this through fiction, characters, plots, lyrical expressions, metaphors and images. Philosophy, on the other hand, must be cleansed of these picturesque contents and grasp the truth strictly conceptually. As a philosopher, I am overly cautious and I approach philosophy with a certain awe. Here I hardly dare to exceed the limits of what is hermeneutically given in the text, so I see myself more as an exegete. Perhaps we live in an age of exegesis, an age of great commentary. Literature, on the other hand, allows me to be bold and provocative in a way that academic work never gave me the opportunity. It allows me to skip academic rigor and scientific apparatus and to communicate something that is urgent to me in terms of my own existence. However, when we begin to peel back and interpret our own existence in literary means, we will soon reach an epochal moment. I am convinced that when we start to dig into ourselves, we do not find our own self independent of the relationships we live in, but we stumble upon the historical 'now' with a capital S, which asks to be interpreted."
Grbić told the audience at the Poet's Square that his best novel is the one that has not been written, but he also referred to the play "Blood Wedding", which he saw at the "Grad Teatar" festival the night before.
"I am close to the universe of Igor Vuk Torbica, although I am not too happy about it. Like the universe of Tanja Mandić Rigonat, it is that Sioran universe. Lorca's text is not too deep, but Torbica wanted to let us know with his directorial interventions that man slaughters man, that two young men are dead. And you know, it's trivial now; death is someone else's business, but the task of art, philosophy or religion is to constantly shake us and remind us that we cannot just walk past it. Indifference is always a sign of talent. Quotient and diligence cannot express talent; it appears when indifference ceases. When indifference to these fundamental questions ends, then something begins, then a change in lifestyle begins. The end of indifference is a sure sign of literary talent," said Grbić.
During the evening, Perišić asked Grbić if he was privately depressed and why, alluding to the title of his latest novel. Grbić replied that he was not sure that he was anything other than depressed.
"When it comes to sadness, when it comes to communicating bitter truths, when it comes to a pessimistic view of the world, it is always justified if it is contained in humor and if the person who expresses it has the ability for self-irony. Otherwise, it is unbearable, it becomes a kind of whining, it is burdensome. When someone is exclusively dark, it seems as if they are aggressive towards you, ill-intentioned. However, if someone communicates bitter truths in a way that can make you laugh, then that is, so to speak, a well-intentioned, non-aggressive, benevolent pessimism, to which I am inclined. When you engage in self-knowledge, you will not isolate an authentic self outside of all these relationships. In my depression there is something of a general feeling of sadness, which in one chapter of the 'Canon of the Depressed Mind' is called fundamental sadness, which means that it precedes all individual sadnesses. Today, the ability to hear something like 'God's call' has been lost, the meaning of the word 'neighbor' has been lost, and when these two things are lost, what I call fundamental sadness begins, which ends in a radically pessimistic place, which is is 'it is best to be unborn'. This topic has troubled many thinkers in the past."
Grbić also said that he felt the need to never meet any writer again.
"It happens that you come out, make your debut, publish a novel, and then that novel becomes a success. That's when you start getting to know writers you previously knew only from the public. Then writers and the literary world disgust you to such an extent that you feel the need to never meet another writer in your life. Honestly, this also applies to critics, to the entire cultural drive, the entire infrastructure that feeds on literature: academic institutions, universities, various juries, awards and clans, influential interest groups. It is so disgusting that someone who loves literature must take it as a categorical imperative - to get out of there as soon as possible. This is the only way to save yourself and to keep that creative impulse in your infantile, childlike vision, in the good sense of the word - to continue to rejoice that you wrote down some fragment, caught some detail, and so on. The only way is to stay away from that literary scum.”
The evening was rounded off by numerous questions from the audience, as well as witty remarks, both by the audience and by the writer.
Bonus video:
