Ranko Marinković splices scenes of dream and reality into a kaleidoscopic short history of the world, whose pessimism is tempered by dark humor

Ranko Marinkovic, Cyclops, Trans. by Vlada Stojiljkovic, Yale UP, 2011


"In his semiautobiographical novel, Cyclops, Croatian writer Ranko Marinkovic recounts the adventures of young theater critic Melkior Tresic, an archetypal antihero who decides to starve himself to avoid fighting in the front lines of World War II. As he wanders the streets of Zagreb in a near-hallucinatory state of paranoia and malnourishment, Melkior encounters a colorful circus of characters—fortune-tellers, shamans, actors, prostitutes, bohemians, and café intellectuals—all living in a fragile dream of a society about to be changed forever.
A seminal work of postwar Eastern European literature, Cyclops reveals a little-known perspective on World War II from within the former Yugoslavia, one that has never before been available to an English-speaking audience. Vlada Stojiljkovic's able translation, improved by Ellen Elias-Bursac's insightful editing, preserves the striking brilliance of this riotously funny and densely allusive text. Along Melkior’s journey Cyclops satirizes both the delusions of the righteous military officials who feed the national bloodlust as well as the wayward intellectuals who believe themselves to be above the unpleasant realities of international conflict. Through Stojiljkovic's clear-eyed translation, Melkior’s peregrinations reveal how history happens and how the individual consciousness is swept up in the tide of political events, and this is accomplished in a mode that will resonate with readers of Charles Simic, Aleksandr Hemon, and Kundera."

"Marinković splices scenes of dream and reality into a kaleidoscopic short history of the world, whose pessimism is tempered by dark humor. His narrative examines the troubled position of the intellectual in times of upheaval with remarkable intensity. " - The New Yorker

"Reflected in the pale glass window, among the shoes on display, was Melkior's thin, unprepossessing silhouette, a poorly built city dweller. The slanting image reflected in the shop window triggered a crafty sneer inside Melkior, and the word mobilization suddenly found itself in autumn mud churned by a squelching olive drab monotony of dejected strangers on some endless trek; there was the bluster of angry sergeants, the tired voice of sodden boots, and the mysterious word "aide-de-camp." Here was born a fear of the new events around him: the driver bound for Apatin to drive a tank... across our mountainous country... Oh for a mountain and a forest in which to go quiet and still like an insect curled deep inside the bark of an indestructible tree: I'm not here...and to live, to live... How to conceal ones existence, steal from the world one's traitorous body, take it off to some endless isolation, conceal it in a cocoon of fear, insinuate oneself into a temporary death?
This is the test of our fair narrator-can Melkior starve himself to avoid being called to military duty in World War II? Filled with literary allusions galore-from Dante to Joyce, Shakespeare to Dosteyvesky-Cyclops is a vertiginous journey into the mind of a tortured man whose mind is unraveling from lack of food and sleep. Published in 1965 and set in the forties of the Former Yugoslavia, Cyclops is Marinkovic's version of literary realism so acute and ego-maniacal there is no escaping for the reader. The reader can only revel in his death defying acts of prose, no small thanks to Vlada Stojiljkovic's amazing translation. This is a classic taught in Croatian schools and with good reason-Marinkovic addresses the threat of human loss and sacrifice in the name of nationalism but also our own detachment from the cost of war when we are not directly involved.
Melkior wanders the streets of Zagreb, lost in his own surreal musings dipped in paranoia. His own interactions with his gaggle of boho friends and his starving dream-states flow into one another until it becomes difficult to know what reality is. As he makes himself the star of the Odyssey and his friends replace Homer's other characters in his hallucinations, the danger of Polyphemus (The Cyclops) looms and threatens to devour them all. The parallels between society's own contradictions about war and Melkior's friends drinking themselves into a stupor(literally and figuratively) on their own intellectual antics shows itself throughout the fast-paced narrative.
Above all, Melkior, a part-time theater critic, and his motley group of friends are poetic cynics who see no hope in anything but their own wittiness and pleasure seeking pastimes as they sit around downing booze at their local bar, the Give 'n Take.. Although this is not an easy book, it's wildly entertaining, full of original characterizations and hilarious, biting prose:
Long live the idiot! That is the safest kind of mimicry life can offer a being of its creation. From his vantage point the idiot watches history run its course without the danger of getting caught up in the action, just as we cry as we watch a film playing in the cinema. We mourn fictitious travails, while it's only an idiot who laughs at genuine deaths. He jeers at life from his safe vantage point, taking his revenge for being rejected, smug at being spared. Life has chosen Intelligence for its games, it does not use idiots to make history. It has chosen geniuses for grand words on the cross, at the guillotine, at the gallows, facing the barrels of guns, in front of nations cheering the Brutuses and Caesars alike. An idiot ceded the cup of poison to Socrates. An idiot ceded to Danton the glory of being decapitated by history. (And then made it up to him by producing a marble bust of his head and raising it on a square as an example for future generations.) Whereas the idiot wears his head with a strange grimace of disgust, as if he had long understood everything, sneered derisively, and stopped time in the rigid folds of his mindless face. Love live the idiot!
There are so many literary allusions that you may wonder if you can possibly have read all the works he throws into his narrative stew. Yet, there is a conscious effort to avoid the reader getting close enough to experience Melkior's fear, instead choosing the have the reader bear witness to his descent into paranoia and isolation.
It's an epic that hangs its hat on pessimism, social commentary, and the personal, societal and philosophical wreckage of war. I couldn't help but think of Celine's work while I read this- in particular, Journey to the End of the Night and Normance-both filled with the same disdain and realism of war. Cyclops doesn't give us the bravery and courage of the stereotyped patriot, but the very human fear of a man lost in his own life and fearful of a fate he knows he can't avoid." - Salonica

"Cyclops is a semi-autobiographical, modernist tour de force by novelist and playwright Ranko Marinkovic, and it may be one of the most outstanding Croatian novels of the postwar period. It swiftly became a bestseller when it was first published in 1965, turning the already notorious author of the controversial anti-Catholic play Glorija into one of the most prominent writers of Yugoslavia.
The reader of Cyclops accompanies theatre critic and archetypal antihero Melkior Tresic through the crowded streets of Zagreb on the eve of World War II. One evening Melkior catches sight of his ex catechist, Dom Kuzma—a priest instantly recognizable by his enormous, jutting ears. These elephantine protuberances are something of a Proustian madeleine for Melkior, who recalls the terrifying religion classes in his native Dalmatia and his sadistic old teacher. What he learns by stalking the priest is that Dom Kuzma has been starving himself, presumably to mortify the flesh and to attempt to regain control over his own death in the face of the incumbent war. Melkior decides to do the same, only in the hope of keeping himself out of combat: “How to conceal one’s existence, steal from the world one’s traitorous body, take it off to some endless isolation, conceal it in a cocoon of fear, insinuate oneself into temporary death?”
As he wanders through the city in a semi-hallucinatory state of paranoia induced by hunger, Melkior encounters a colorful array of characters—poets, actors, café intellectuals, fortune-tellers and prostitutes. Everyone he encounters seems to be partaking of the delusion that life as they know it will never change. The protagonist's favorite den of iniquity, where he surrounds himself with this motley crew, is the Give'n'Take—a house of drink-sodden madcap living and dissipation. The surfeit of alcohol, aimless intellectual banter, masterful pranks, scuffles and liaisons is meant to blunt the horrors of the encroaching war.
The denizens of the Give'n'Take (who refer to themselves as the “Parampion Brethren”) use monikers for one another—for instance, Melkior is called Eustachius ("visionary," to evoke the Roman general who saw Jesus between a stag's antlers while hunting). The slyly allusive nicknames embody the most remarkable stylistic feature of Cyclops: its overt, baroque, and playful derivateveness. Melkior and his fellow Parampionics endlessly quote from the classics (Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and also iconic Croatian poets) and perceive reality through a highly elaborate and deceptive literary filter. They live by the Wildean dictum that life should imitate art. Nothing that's happening to them is just what it is—it is first and foremost an opportunity to show off with a quote. Even then, there is a secondhandedness to the display, as it is often a pale imitation of some memorable scene or character from another literary work of the past. The literary filter supersedes any other mode of interpretation—whether political, ethical, or psychological.
With the war rapidly approaching, this all amounts to a form of necessary escapism.
The constant allusions imbue the characters' lives with a depth of meaning otherwise unachievable. ("Don't proclaim every little bastard who can think of an ever so slightly twisted plot to be an Ivan Karamazov, or every lovable idiot, a Prince Mishkin".). But more importantly, the literariness of their exchanges covers the brute materiality of life ("all these moving, masticating, shouting, laughing organisms") with a veneer of immortal beauty and keeps the cruelty of war at bay. In Melkior's words, "The trick is to regard everything as an image on a screen . . . the objects become weak and powerless, under my full control. Symbolic of a world I have created and can banish immediately by closing my eyes." Of course, this all-encompassing literary filter also exemplifies the portentous power human imagination wields over reality: "Your imagination reveals who you are; it also determines whose you are." Man's imaginings decide his destiny.
Un-originality is a deliberate choice on Marinkovic's part—when there seem to be no words that can adequately describe the chaos and alienation of a society on the brink of ruin, all that’s left to a writer is borrowing the words of the masters. His is also an extreme attempt at preserving a sense of strong cultural identity when all that's familiar and meaningful is about to be wiped away by violence and dictatorship. Melkior is paralyzed by fear when confronting "the life force within him," which entails nothing but unbearable pain, shameful urges, and inevitable decay ("does there already exist the bullet which will bore through my head?"). The modern age strives to stave off the dark side of "the life force" with technological innovations (and even war as a form of "hygiene"), whereas Melkior’s mentor Maestro (and Melkior with him) do so by taking shelter in the classics and getting intoxicated on poetry, female beauty, and alcohol.
Maestro's anti-Futurist stance is out of sync with his time in its passionate cult of the past and bitter rejection of speed as progress: "The cult of the machine! The preposterousness of it! The petrol-fumed inspiration! Their Pegasus a Ford . . .What poetry was ever conceived in an automobile . . . Progress is welcome to pass me by. I'm staying put! Let it rush, let it fly!" In Cyclops Modernity (a hydra-like phenomenon typified by electricity, advertising, and trams) and death are intertwined. To the non-believer Maestro one leads inevitably to the other—he (literally) pisses on Modernity and electrocutes himself, comparing his own grand act to a legendary death immortalized by Plato in his Apology ("Socrates was killed by hemlock and I'll be killed by the invisible God ELECTRON!").
The dense intertextuality of Cyclops does not manifest itself only as compulsive quoting. As the title aptly implies, Marinkovic is employing (in a nostalgic rather than mocking manner) some of the staple devices of epic narratives: recurring monikers; mise en abyme; and refrains like that of war as "the one-eyed beast" about to devour all living things. Like Virgil in The Divine Comedy, Maestro guides Melkior through the Hell of their Historic Times. He declares to prefer oral literature (that is to say, epic poetry) to writing: "human thought came into being on the foot. The ancient Greeks thought in the street. The peripatetics walked. As people talk, so they walk." Melkior's peripateticism is his way of trying to make sense of a world without sense - Cyclops is a hymn to the flâneur as the ultimate philosopher.
The "Cyclops" of the title stands therefore for all the external forces that threaten the flâneur Melkior's survival in his imaginary world, while at the same time hinting at Marinkovic's artistic models: Homer's Odyssey as the archetypal quest and Ulysses as the archetypal "modern" novel. Like in Joyce's, in Marinkovic's the action unfolds in a circular motion around a big city. In Ulysses, the episode entitled "Cyclops" refers both to the first-person 'I' of the narrator and to the character of the Citizen, who fails to realize the folly of his narrow-sighted thinking: by naming his own novel after that particular chapter in Ulysses, Marinkovic insinuates that Melkior and his fellow Parampionics are the one-eyed Cyclops, trapped in their self-indulgent intellectualism and believing themselves to be above the unpleasant realities of the international conflict.
And yet, there's a certain bravery in allowing oneself to be blinded—or, one may say, guided—by beauty. With its haunting ambiguity and its wonderfully eccentric prose overflowing with literary memories, Cyclops is therefore not only a powerful meditation on the psychology of the artist at times of social crisis, but also a poignant paean to the resilience of imagination in the face of horror and death." - Valentina Zanca

"THIS CLASSIC OF MODERN European literature, which appeared in Croatia in 1965, has just been published in English for the first time. The novel opens with the narrator describing a familiar scene as a math equation. Standing in a public building, Melkior observes two neon signs, one for “Ladies” and one for “Gents”, glowing above intersecting staircases. “A staircase X, he thought, reciprocal values, the numerators GENTS and the numerators LADIES (cross multiplication), the denominators ending up downstairs in majolica and porcelain, where the denominators keep a respectful silence.” No matter what cultural symbols we hide behind, Ranko Marinković coyly reminds us, the lowest common denominator of humanity will always be human waste.
Such cerebral imagery is typical of Marinković, whose narrative epic—set in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1940s—is based on Ulysses, which had appeared in Croatian a few years before Cyclops. The narrator’s compulsion to turn every experience into an intellectual exercise, partially as a response to the horror of World War II, puts Cyclops squarely in the genre that James Wood has called hysterical realism. Melkior, a theater critic who lives alone in a boardinghouse populated by eccentrics, seeks to escape his aimlessness—and his fear of the encroaching fascists—by endlessly perambulating the frenetic city of Zagreb and the insular world of his own thoughts. His mind is a “torture chamber” to which he willingly confines himself, believing that in the mental “labyrinths around which he raced blithely shouting, ‘I’ve disappeared, I’m not here,’ he would really and truly disappear from the sight of the absurdity that lay in wait for him.”

Like Melkior, the reader avoids despair—and most other emotions—by trying to keep up with Marinković’s rapid thought associations, peppered with references to Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Petrarch, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, and a handful of Croatian poets. Although Cyclops seeks to reveal the problems inherent in trying to think one’s way out of reality, the narrator embodies those problems to such a degree that Marinković leaves the reader feeling mightily confined. Still, the stylistic quality of Cyclops—which preceded similar and seminal works of Pynchon, Rushdie, and DeLillo—easily places Markinkovic among the great social novelists of the twentieth century.
As Melkior wanders between bar, café, and bedroom, he meets a zany cast of bohemians and intellectuals who gorge on booze, chase women, and indulge in futile philosophical debates. All of his conversations are punctuated by unspoken paranoia and convoluted fantasies, due in part to sleep and food deprivation. Hoping to avoid conscription by rendering himself unfit for service, Melkior has declared war on his own body, giving the “greedy brute” just enough nourishment to (mostly) avoid fainting, and talking to himself at night to stave off “fortifying” sleep. In trying to protect himself from the physical suffering of war, he develops such loathing for his body that he fears he will slit his own throat in his sleep.
The dangers of Melkior’s solipsism are all the more ironic given that he has no inkling of the suffering from which he is “protecting” himself. Upon reading the headline, “BOMBS HIT LONDON IN WAR’S WORST RAID: Six Hours of Hell and Horror,” Melkior feels only indifference: “he could picture nothing specific behind those alarming words, no dead child, crushed skull, man despairing over his demolished home and slaughtered family, none of those terrible scenes which were really there behind headlines.” Preferring lofty literary torments to unknown ones, Melkior imagines war as Polyphemus, the one-eyed cannibal, and himself as a modern-day Odysseus, trying to escape from the Cyclops’ cave. This “eternal companion of a thought” is more real to him than Hitler’s advance.

Melkior’s detachment from immediate, bodily reality is so extreme that he believes rape is a myth invented by women who are spurned after sex. In one of his many imagined conversations, he tells a momentary object of his lust that women all secretly long to be taken with force: “If a savage were to convert while on top of her, in a manner of speaking, this could even blossom into love. She would forgive him everything thanks to his subsequent redeeming tenderness. ‘Ah, I remember how rough you were when you first took me! But I can now confess that I liked it so much. What a he-man! What a warrior! Then again, perhaps it’s the only way to find true love.’” Although this potentially rich provocation is never unwound for the reader, it suggests that Melkior denies the possibility of any authentic experience unmediated by self-serving thoughts and ugly notions. Rape, like love, exists only as an idea.
Melkior does spend a good bit of time pursuing his idea of the beloved, a seductive beauty he barely knows. He purposefully avoids learning her name, preferring to call her by an invented moniker. And even as he pines for his “Viviana,” he continues sleeping with a married woman who rhapsodizes about her husband’s love for her while she revels in Melkior’s crass ravishment. Bemoaning Enka’s needy duplicity, Melkior asks himself, “Oh Lord, must they all be like that? And the Lord inside him replied cruelly: Every single one!” This is, of course, the same cruel internal Lord who believes in the mind’s strict alienation from the body.
But no matter how much authority Melkior grants his thoughts, he cannot “steal from the world his traitorous body” and live in the mind alone. Despite his hatred of Enka, he continues sleeping with her. Despite his obsessive attempt to weaken his body, he is still called up for duty.
While Melkior desperately denies the animality of the human form, one of his drinking buddies embodies the lonely dignity of living through tangible experience. The candidly named Maestro prefers walking to the tram, silence to conversation, oral poetry to books. As he is strolling home from the bar with Melkior one rainy evening, he tells his friend about his hatred for electrical cables, which inspire the fear and awe once reserved for God:
“Fold the umbrella, look up… those black lines, those staves, empty of notes, across the sky, That’s It—the Powerline. You, of course, find my hate of those copper wires ridiculous?”
“I’m already used to your bizarre ways….”
“But I’m not after anything bizarre… I genuinely hate the thing,” said Maestro very quietly, indeed with a kind of modesty.
The moment is arresting for its clear communication of a personal feeling, so glaringly and programmatically absent from the rest of the book. Alas, a few pages later, Maestro electrocutes himself by peeing on this powerline: one authentic death in a city “already lying down in submission,” and “waiting patiently for the tramp of army boots.”
The unrelenting bleakness of Cyclops is allayed somewhat by Marinković’s exquisite wordplay. After Enka’s husband nearly surprises the two lovers in bed, Melkior escapes from her apartment through a hidden passageway. Equating lust with another unsavory common denominator of humanity, Markinovic describes Melkior “seeking a way out of this abdominal darkness, like a piece of feces on its scatological journey down Enka’s spry intestine.”
Despite the lively, witty imagery through which Melkior’s cynicism is conveyed, the unexamined constancy of that cynicism is wearying. Unlike the antiheroes of Notes from the Underground and Sabbath’s Theater, Melkior lacks the coherent sense of identity which would allow the reader any emotional engagement with his antics. That this refusal of compassion is deliberate may make Cyclops a successful literary exercise, but it does not make for pleasant reading." - Hannah Tennant-Moore

"The main character in Cyclops is Melkior Tresić, a theater and film critic for a newspaper in Zagreb. It is early 1941, with the war not yet having reached Yugoslavia when the novel begins (it has by the end), and, until the end, Melkior repeatedly tries to evade being called up for military duty -- mainly by trying to starve himself, making himself too light-weight to serve. He's not entirely successful in starving himself, and indeed remains wracked by various hungers and lusts -- including his passion for the elusive Viviana (which isn't actually the woman's name, but that's what he calls her) -- and Cyclops follows his peregrinations (physical and mental) and encounters.

Throughout Cyclops: "Melkior unravels and spins long and tangled thoughts", and his state often seems almost trance-like. Typically:
The Future ? What about you -- do you believe in the future?
He could not tell, at first, whether it was his guest asking him or he was still listening to his own insatiable train of thought.
No, the guest was sound asleep.
It is quite an "insatiable train of thought" that Melkior keeps up, but he is not left entirely to his own devices, as much of the novel presents his interaction with others, from the banter with his colleagues to his intimate encounters. Marinković presents a dense, allusive text; the dialogue, in particular, is almost all referential repartee (by a band of very well-read intellectuals) -- a fair amount specific to the time and locale, but also in the greater Western cultural tradition, with much (more or less) clear to even contemporary readers. (It goes right down to the physical descriptions: one character is simply called 'Moustache à la Adolphe Menjou', while another's appearance is succinctly reduced to: "Tall, bony ? Eyes by Picasso ?" ) Marinković both revels in this and jokes about it -- suggesting early on, in describing a scene which includes a consumptive girl reading:
At this point somebody else would write that she was reading The Sorrows of Young Werther or Adolphe or The Torrents of Spring; well, just to show them make it a book by Kumičić, Jelka's Sprig of Basil, or even Chance by the same author.
And he admits: "Originality almost frightened Melkior with its literary coyness." Cyclops tries (often successfully) for originality, but also grounds itself securely in the familiar (literary) past; so also with the mythical Cyclops, one-eyed Polyphemus, of the title, who haunts Melkior throughout.
Melkior, dazed both because he is half-starved and utterly exhausted, as well as because of the sensory overload -- largely verbal - he (and the reader) are confronted with, finds:
I'm alone and mindless like an idiot. Can't you see the dreams I have ? How can I sleep ? Inside your safe circle of fire, treaties, and bayonets -- don't be surprised -- I'm very poorly protected from myself.
And later he describes his condition:
I have reason so that I can lie to myself and know that I am lying to myself so that I can go on living. In order to look forward to the next day which may bring joy. And when no joy appears I will hope again and fill my thoughts with lies to bring on sleep. And I shall dream that I am alive forever. But then Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops will wake and plug the cave of my dream with an enormous rock and there will be no way out.
One hope he holds out for is Viviana, a love-ideal that remains just beyond his reach. She is cleverly presented, in all ways ungraspable, even when she is tantalizing close by, with even her actual name remaining elusive -- and it not being important to Melkior to know it: he cares more about maintaining the idealized image he has created for himself, which goes by the name 'Viviana'. And, as one friend tells Melkior:
"She likes you, too, you know. Thing is, you think too much in the late Plato's terms. Which is not her cup of tea. Frankly, she doesn't understand that sort of pragmatics.
Indeed, Melkior's 'pragmatics' don't get him very far in any respect, as Cyclops is a whirlpool-narrative that goes around in dizzying circles down into the wartime-abyss. From Buddhist asceticism - "Oh Great Gautama, how am I to break free of the accursed wish for existence ? I know the sacred truth about pain, but I love my pain." - to realist resignation, Melkior traverses great (theoretical) distances in dealing with the fundamental existential issues that arise as war closes in.
Marinković's text is dense but surprisingly fast-paced -- though still, ultimately, somewhat long-winded . He packs enormous amounts in, challenging the reader -- much in the way Melkior challenges himself at one point:
Now what do you make of it? Come on, psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, criminologists, sophists, sadists, causists, Jesuits, diplomats, gnostics, mystics, dialecticians, occultists, moralists, veterinarians, dustmen, firemen... what do you make of it?
There's a great deal of word-play here, even beyond the many literary allusions and references, and even this jaunty translation bogs down at times ("The Croatian word for dagger is bodež, if you strip the zh from bodež -- you get bode, a silly harmless pricking", etc.). For the most part, however, it reads well, a surprisingly lively story even in its often sleepy fog.
It is Melkior that is the theater critic, but Marinković has another character explain to him:
We don't need tragedy to discover the dreadful truth. Indeed, tragedy cloaks the truth with the charm of art, it seduces us into enjoyment by lifting its soiled theatrical skirt coquettishly before us and showing us the seamy side of life with a fetching grin. Not even death itself is serious here. Nothing is serious, all is simply beautiful and desirable. But I want to see the truth naked, without its tragic rags. Because I know that underneath those rags lies something else tragic, a profound and genuine and terrible tragedy, one that no Racine or Shakespeare can help me with.
Cyclops also veils its truths, Marinković resorting to dream- and trance-like states; it also is far more comic than tragic -- but also hints at that profound and genuine and terrible tragedy beneath.
Cyclops is a tour of considerable forces, and certainly stunning in how well it captures that specific time and place. In its specifics, however, - and its reliance on them - it is also less accessible than the great novels of more familiar places, the early twentieth century novels of Paris or Vienna or Berlin, for example; it also doesn't quite allow for the universality of an otherwise similarly specific city-novel such as Joyce's Ulysses.
A strong, often fascinating work, there's also no doubt that there simply is a lot to this: at over five hundred pages, it's a very weighty read that isn't entirely consistently compelling." - M. A. Orthofer

Morana Čale: "THE FRACTION MAN”: ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE CYCLOPS (pdf)