By Prof. Alfred Uçi
Part Two
MIGJENI, IN THE WHIRLPOOL OF UNTRUTHS AND SPECULATIONS
Memorie.al / “At the funeral of old idols, the bells shall crack from tolling, the minarets shall break their backs from bowing, and the vocal cords of the priests shall snap from singing. And silence will come. For every scream begins and ends with silence. Then, the work shall begin.” (From “Idols without Heads” – Migjeni). History works fundamentally, being merciless. Through its seemingly absurd and paradoxical game, it fulfills its purpose, astonishing the generations to come with the rigorous selection of its sieve: ultimately, it puts everything in its place. It topples figures forcibly raised onto pedestals; it dissipates the glow of false halos even when they are embalmed to be preserved eternally in its bosom; it flings them away like chaff and abandons them finally to oblivion.
Continued from the last issue
The experience of the universal dimensions of history helps him conceive it not only poetically but also deeply, recognizing all the subterranean currents, all the tangled and contradictory flows, all its surges and subsidences. From history, he sought to draw lessons for the nation’s future, because he feared: “Or perhaps the centuries are still mocking us.” We must not lose any more, as we have lost throughout the centuries – this was his conclusion:
“We must not lose / in the game / we want victory, the victory of conscience and free thought! / We do not want, for the sake / of old ruins that seek ‘sanctification’ / to plunge again into the pool of misery / to wail again, the song of sadness / the soul-less, monotonous song of slavery – / to be a thorn driven into the brains of humanity.”
Secondly, we call Migjeni the most modern poet of the 1930s because he intuitively sensed the new trends of contemporary world literature, placing the problem of alienation at its center. Migjeni was no longer satisfied with Enlightenment and Rationalist illusions regarding the “kingdom” of reason and universal harmony.
By seeking the roots of things and the genesis of processes, a reality full of contradictions and hostile forces, paradoxical and absurd situations, was revealed to Migjeni. He discovers that the movement of human life is not directed and commanded only by the force of reason, but receives subterranean impulses and blows from irrational forces. For the poet, history is the arena where the forces of good and evil, the creative and the destructive, clash and struggle.
Within it acts the “best part of man,” reason, but also “ancestral atavism and the instinct of a wild organism”; there acts “Man-Socrates,” but also “Man-Pig”; there acts Hamlet, but also Don Quixote (as seen in the prose sketches “Either… Or…”, “The Death of the Sparrow”). This intersection of forces pushes humanity not only toward creation but also toward destruction. For Migjeni, the path of humanity is not linear but filled with “dangerous dances,” where it is very difficult to distinguish causes from effects, culprits from victims, actors from authors and spectators. Therefore, contrary to desires, conscious goals, and human will, unexpected, unforeseen, and undesired consequences erupt in life.
This process of alienation, according to Migjeni, leaves no sphere of individual or social life outside its action. In the story “The Harvest,” Migjeni (as in the wonderful metamorphoses of fairy tales) reveals this dialectic of alienation as a universal law of life and the world: The peasants, going to harvest, are surprised that, instead of wheat, cannons have sprouted in the fields. “What is this? We did not sow this seed…! And yet, it is said: ‘Whatever seed you sow, that shall you reap.’ We sowed wheat seed, yet here iron cannons have sprouted!”
A world and a life built backward, according to Migjeni, also produce a backward – meaning alienated – consciousness. He had in mind all the old and new mythologies that distort the picture of real life and prevent man from approaching the truth. He considered it a noble duty of realist art to tear the masks off the “bogeymen born of darkness,” to demystify political, social, moral, and aesthetic mythologies – these “bombarodame” (as he called them), “perfumed prayers” – and to open people’s eyes, illuminate their minds, and save them from “sick brains.” By making alienation the hearth of his artistic inquiry, Migjeni manages to discover many “secrets” of life and human existence that had escaped the eyes of preceding writers.
Thirdly, Migjeni was the most modern writer of the 1930s because, like no other, he subjected all the life material he used to a truly new perspective: the existential one. The fate of man in the world, his happiness and misfortune – this was the dominant theme in Migjeni’s creativity.
Far from any dogmatism or sentimentalism, Migjeni saw man neither as a being of ideal, divine perfection, nor as a reptile; must man be taken as he is in himself and in social circumstances; likewise, his life must be taken as it is. Within the two extremes of existence – birth and death – according to the poet, life and human existence are filled with the most diverse experiences: sweet and bitter, conscious and spontaneous, rational and instinctive; they are filled with the temptations of Paradise and Hell.
Reasoning on the essence of man and human existence, Migjeni wants to be neither shallow nor a whiner; he teaches you to take life seriously because it attracts us with its beauties and virtues, because it is given to us once and we must enjoy it, but simultaneously it is harsh, insidious, and cunning. Life, according to the poet, is difficult because man “is born in small crumbs of tears, and from there sets out on the path of his fate with hope in small victories, traversing all regions where the roads are paved with thorns, around which are seen graves with tears and the fools who grin.”
In life, there are factors that oppose man and can make him pessimistic. Here is how the poet views one side of the world: “… This whole world / in the bosom of the Universe is a wound / where the punishable being crawls prone / with a will crushed in the first of a giant…!” In the sketch “Tragedy or Comedy,” Migjeni deepens this existential motif: “The human race is a living guitar, upon which the Saint and the Executioner produce tragic or comic melodies…! A bitter melody, as bitter as our world (The Earth) is on the tip of the cosmos’s tongue.”
From this, Migjeni reasons as if he had been familiar with the preachings of post-World War II existentialist thinkers, the philosophy of the absurdity of human existence. In the sketch “The Suicide of the Sparrow,” the poet meditates: “The light of the mind can serve to discover a beautiful world,” but Migjeni’s sparrow is born and finds itself abandoned in an absurd, hostile world, dominated by animalistic forces and “porcine” beginnings.
How and why the sparrow finds itself in this meaningless world, “at this cosmic point,” is unknown. According to Migjeni, intellect is not enough for the sparrow to become happy (for it “brought peace and good to few”); with its help, one can discover the absurd sides of the world, and it is precisely these that force the intellect to make “logical leaps”: “What are these logical leaps?” someone will shout. Yes, dear and not shallow reader. Yes! Do we not have enough logical, moral, and dogmatic leaps in our real world? Why are you angry and wanting to judge me for a few harmless logical leaps…?!” The alienating force of life places man before many dilemmas: To distance oneself from it by contemplating it, or to participate in the absurd game? To play the role of Hamlet (the humanist paralyzed by hesitation who does not act) or the role of Don Quixote, dancing the dance of his endless but, as Migjeni says, necessary adventures?
Through existential meditations, the poet reaches the conclusion that society is locked in a very serious crisis and man, in search of a way out, does not know what to do and drags himself through the tragedy-comedy of his own existence. Therefore, only the awareness of life’s difficulties can enable him to face them, remaining in a permanent search for a way out. However distant the time Migjeni speaks of, his aforementioned existential meditations seem current; they seem to be produced by today’s difficulties, by the crisis accompanying the country’s democratization process. You may like Migjeni’s existential meditations, or you may not, but their philosophical depth and humanitarian content cannot be denied.
Migjeni believes that through the tangled paths of history, man finds – albeit with difficulty, sacrifice, and toil – the paths to move forward, to rise higher. “A time has come,” the poet wrote in the poem-testament, “The Preface of Prefaces,” “in which people understand each other quite well to build the Tower of Babel, – / And at the top of the tower, at the very peak of the throne / man shall climb and cry out / – God! Where are you?” These sententious lines powerfully expressed the credo of the humanitarian message carried by all of Migjeni’s existential meditations.
Finally, Migjeni was the most modern writer of the 1930s also for the fact that he realized the new aesthetic content he brought to art with a new artistic language, with expressiveness previously unknown in our literature. He liberated literature from rigidified Classicist canons and archaic scholastic rhapsody, opening the way for the aesthetics of “free verse”. The aim to express the hidden and complicated knots of human life with artistic expressivity pushed him to use a figurative typology rich in grotesque, metaphors, hyperboles, parables, etc.
In a new way (bringing fresh material), Migjeni also uses traditional mythological figuration, which he subjects to concrete life material. He expanded the semantic load of mythological figuration without stripping it of its universality, without equating it with the specific meaning of contemporary reality’s facts. In the spirit of realism, Migjeni does not set mythological figuration to work for a naturalistic representation, but to increase the density of information and artistic messages, generalizations, and emotional-expressive force.
By bringing a rich philosophical content to literature, he used new forms and genres, such as the small sketches (novelëzat), whose fundamental aesthetic meaning lay not in the fable or the anecdotal narrative plot, but mainly in deep philosophical meditations and a special ironic-satiric charge. The new means of artistic expressivity Migjeni used and the democratic humanitarian ideal that inspired him integrate him into the treasures of modern 20th-century world literature.
To Migjeni we return and will return constantly, not only to celebrate and pay homage on the anniversaries of his birth and death, not only because from his literary work the rejuvenating juices of Migjenian greenery flow alive in the veins of our contemporary literature, but also because his work is a permanent incentive for the enrichment of the spiritual and intellectual life and culture of our nation, for its progress on the path of democracy. / Memorie.al
