Inside the Kutelian text: The search for death as salvation and the thirst for eternity

By: Eduart Bardhi

Hermann Hesse testified that literature is a means for creating "kingdoms beyond time and illusion," or "eternities."[1] So, its world can encourage the creation of a “vision of eternity”, based on universal and eternal values. Medieval painting, meanwhile, through colorful paintings, has testified to the existence of another kingdom of values, that of the “community of the saints”, the great inspirer of literature on which several centuries of literature have been created. The “community of the saints” (the idea of ​​God), codified in memory through painting, constitutes a double paradigm: moral and sociological. As a moral paradigm, it has served art, literature above all, as well as theological teachings. As a sociological paradigm, meanwhile, it has influenced the unification of people who believe in a system of values.

Religion, the “kingdom of the saints”, thus constitutes the gift that the Middle Ages gave to humanity: the creation of the religious community, as a community, which brings people closer together on certain common values. Community implies memory and not the everyday from which faith and action are directed. Medieval literature, therefore, links religious memory with the vision of community in the “eternal kingdom” of letters.

Religious community is built on two powerful premises: communication and socialization.[2] By translating old religious texts, the philo-biblical authors aimed to make it easier for the Christian Arbëror to learn the teachings of God, by hearing them (rather than reading them) sung in their own language. Thus, they fulfilled the first criterion of religious communion: communication “in one language”. Secondly, they aimed to keep them “tied to the church” by translating religious texts into the language of the northern believers (the regional or local principle is also a criterion of communion). From this type of coordination, the ethno-linguistic community was created, which is identified with the (regional) territory, language and culture. Thus, philo-biblical literature, in addition to its utilitarian role, also created the partial dimension of the nation (of the national pre-formation: ethnicity). It gave impetus to the identification of a community, which by aiming for religious homogeneity, expanding forms of communication, and defining a regional territory whose members could socialize with each other, preceded the later process of nation formation.

Later Albanian literature recognized this heritage, developing a type of literature that refers to the medieval religious myth, especially at the level of discourse. Religion penetrated in various forms into the meta-writing of our letters, in addition to the spiritual influence it had from time to time – not because of its construction as a reality, but because of historical and social circumstances. Albanians, by chance having the philosophy of their existentialism – ironically – precisely within religion: they are left with a late literature, with its creators – especially of early literature – clerics.

The essence of religion is the supernatural, and a universal aspect of it is the belief in spirits, souls, and life after death. Tylor felt that the belief in a spirit within man, animals, and even inanimate objects represented the earliest forms of religion. It developed, he believed, from dreams and other experiences associated with sleep. When early man slept, he often dreamed of places and actions. After discovering that his body did not leave home during sleep, he came across the idea that his soul or spirit had had the experiences that his dream recalled.[3]

Viewed in terms of time, Kutel's stories mainly contain the past, recent and distant eras, the history engraved in the memory of the people, which the author traces, clarifies, interprets and describes. It comes from mythology, through extraordinary beings and deeds, as a blurred part of history and unfolds in clear events and figures; it speaks of the time of Skanderbeg and Bendo Shapërdani; it describes the great era of the Renaissance, evokes events of the Balkan and world wars and stops at the borders between the two times, when the efforts for a free Albania are closed and the people's disappointment and hatred towards the power of the beys begin.[4] Even when you get events that cross this boundary, they are shown more as events of the past.

Within Kutel's text, integrated into the ideomatic and interpretative breadth of the entire narrative, is the theme of death. One could argue that Kutel is a special type of modern storyteller, who combines fantasy and folkloric perception with biblical scriptural culture, to tell us about death in a version that is both mythical and prophetic, as well as contemporary. "All stories that begin and continue in the morning end with death, and he would not be a true storyteller if he kept it away from you."[5]

In almost all of this prose writer's stories, death is present as a pronouncement, as a shadow, as a vision, as a destroyer, as a reality; but some of them try to grasp a more essential understanding of death, which is related to the popular perception, which establishes through phantasmagoria a connecting bridge between the two worlds, through a journey that today we would call the astral journey of souls, trying to give the longing of the dead to leave behind, turning sometimes into white gods, sometimes into spoons, sometimes into butterflies that come and lie on the window ledges of their houses, as a final bridge of connection with the world of the living... Meanwhile, the part that is even more interesting has become the object of many studies on Kutel, precisely the expectation of death as eternity, as salvation, as a perfect end, where the soul freed from sins tries to unite as soon as possible with its creator and necessarily return to the source from which it departed, to temporarily take shelter in a human body...

The first conceptual level on death, according to popular mythical perception, appears mainly in The dead and the living, which is built roughly according to the model of the folk tale The dead man pays off his debts, with some changes in the plot and narrative, as well as in Rima Kateriniza, built according to the motifs of the Mimikaliu tale. This mythical perception also appears in several other stories, such as The dead and The spoons of our village. Here we have a dialogue between two worlds, a spiritual communication where both parties, after experiencing the reality of this and the other, unfortunately end up in the world beyond the grave; even the butterflies, after wandering for a while in this world, suddenly disappear.

In the second conceptual plane of death, we would mainly include the narrative How Ago Jakupi found the way to God and the novel Great is the burden of sin.. While partial elements of the construction of this meaning of death can be found, not infrequently, in his other narratives. These are not simply to necessarily reveal the meaning of death, but to emphasize human goodness, the liberation of the soul and its preparation to go to the creator through charitable activity for the benefit of the community, like Papu Tira, the rich and formerly poor, Latir Kulira.

On this level, death is sought for the individual primarily in the spectrum of communication with divinity, as evidence that shows the ultimate degree of fragile stoicism of human beings and their helplessness before eternity in this world.

We find an intermediate connection between these levels of meaning of death when separation is introduced as an integral part of the narrative - love, which becomes the cause for the dead to temporarily return to this world (Rina Katerinaza and The spoons of our village), or when earthly love turns into a punishment to capture eternity (Father Tanushi of Bubëtime). This interaction of eros with thanatos; two basic human instincts according to Freud, is due to the fact that the concept of happiness and pain at the same time, throughout the literature of the centuries.

Love is inextricably linked to two aspects: love as happiness that belongs to earthly life and pain that belongs to the soul. This connection necessarily creates a bridge that keeps two completely opposite worlds connected. People wander between these two directions, passing through feelings that are called feelings. Therefore, Leopardi in one of his cantos expresses:

When for the first time
in the depths of captivity love is born
Possibly and slowly, along with it penetrates
in the heart the desire for death
Why? I don't know, but this
it is an unmistakable sign of true passion.

In the first type of narratives, as we stated above, the author establishes a dialogue between two worlds. The cause of this phantasmagoric correlation is either keeping one's word, or love, or longing for living loved ones. "The union of the living Youth with the dead Kirilloj, the love of Tat Tanushi with Kalija, the union in the evil abyss of the girl with the 'white wings' with Pjeter Kulira, etc., represent the mutual struggle of two souls separated by death."[6]

This concept of union attempts to bring the other into the solidarity of this world, given that he has clothed himself... This constitutes the mindset around which his narrative prose revolves.

The mythological East in Kutel's works has ethnic clothing, but its message is universal. Like the genius of the experience of oral creation, Kutel aims towards the manifestation of what has to do with the essence, with the common energy that unites people in a letter. This energy does not disappear, but remains in the life of lives and is precisely the universal energy.

In some studies of cultural anthropology, attention is drawn to the way in which man communicates with the divine. Man addresses God through prayers, sacrifices, through participation in models, while the divine addresses the human through miracles, or dreams. The divine message is given to Ago Jakupi through a dream: until the end of his life, he is given the opportunity to save his soul in relation to God. The dream was the code that Ago Jakupi deciphers and realizes in life to take on the status of the temporary; and after realizing the catharsis, he goes to lie down at the doors of the ark of death that he had prepared himself: “And he was added to the many”. This is the end according to A. Plasari: death as an absolute beginning, as a perfect end, as the origin and essence of life, as the past and future of the present.[7] Kuteli fully realizes this as Janushi of Bubëtime, a multiplied message of his entire process of Deed.

The religious tone is conceived of linguistic signs through the selection of characters. At one point, Tata, by giving absolute importance to earthly love, disrupts the balance of the universe, of the relationship of genius with God, and this brings immortality. But, human life, according to a genius projection, cannot be shaken by the human mind, since human suffering must end. Here, the death penalty is translated into endless suffering, in a way like in the myth of Sisyphus. From the relationship of two basic instincts understood as two basic necessities, eros and thanatos, the author projects the ordeal of human life. He has placed the events according to a fictional movement where the death of Kalija and love mark two narrative nodes where the entire narrative line is described. The prose, through the plasticity of the phrase, brings to the receiver the feeling of eternity through descriptions of situations and objects with religious charge.

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[1] Herman Hesse, The Steppenwolf (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main), quoted according to the Albanian translation: Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf, translated by Arbër Çeliku, “Asdreni”, Skopje, 2010, p. 171.

[2] A. Smyth, National Identity (London, "Penguin", 1991), p. 6.

[3] Lowell D. Holmes, Anthropology: An Introduction (The Ronald Press Company, New York), 1965, page 240.

[4] Mirosh Markaj. Places and people in the work of M. Kutel (Speech given at the scientific session dedicated to the 80th anniversary of M. Kutel. Pogradec, October 1987).

[5] Ernest Hemingway Death in the afternoon (Tirana, 2002), p. 19.

[6] Plasari A., The bridge between the living and the dead (Prishtina, 2000), p. 82.

[7] Ibid., p. 93.