To Grieve Or Not to Grieve?: The Unsteady Representation of Violence in Ivo Andric's the Bridge on the Drina (Report‪)‬

In the four-hundred-year time-span of Ivo Andric's The Bridge on the Drina, the reader is confronted with abundant incidences of violence. From the beginnings of the bridge to its final fragmentation, blood and suffering are the faithful companions of life in Visegrad. Though Andric asserts the significance of ordinary life on the bridge--the daily gatherings of townspeople and the lengthy conversations on the kapia--violent acts frequently disturb the flow of this life. So much so, that one might say that violence, in all of its colorful manifestations, is one of several persistent themes that forge conceptual cohesion within Andric's seemingly fragmentary narrative. (1) As it chronicles the history of Visegrad, The Bridge on the Drina also recounts a history of violence. Despite these frequent displays of brutal violence, Andric scholars have argued that in The Bridge on the Drina (and in many of Andric's works) individual victimization is not significantly mourned. Gordana Crnkovic argues that since the individual is given little weight in the epic scope of Andric's novel-chronicle, when he or she perishes, it is always possible to find consolation in the ongoing life of humanity and the eternity of art. "Specific destinies and tragedies, narrated in detail," writes Crnkovic, "lose their weight under the sheer scope of the historical novel." (2) Through a poetics of "minimizing and displacing," Andric's historical novels--as opposed to some of his earlier works such as Ex Ponto and Unrest--do not take stock of individual destiny, and grow oblivious of individual victimization in the seamless eternity of the human species. (3)