What the Dervish Confessed about Death:
Meša Selimović's Death and the Dervish
Zoran Milutinović
Scholarship as the Art of Life: Contributions on Serbian Literature, Culture, and Society by Friends of Radmila (Rajka) Gorup. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, ed. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 65–77.
Abstract: This paper treats the problem of faith, life, and death as represented in Meša Selimović's novel Death and the Dervish. Ahmed Nurudin loses his faith in god and justice when his earthly dealings take a wrong turn: when his brother is imprisoned and his efforts to find out the reason for his borther's imprisonment prove unsuccessful. He regains his faith in god and justice when his social standing improves—notwithstanding his brother's death, which could not be undone by anyone—and when he himself becomes a qadi, a judge, an earthly representative of god's justice. At the very end of the novel, Ahmed Nurudin loses his faith once more, which coincides with his earthly dealings taking a wrong turn again—a fatally wrong turn. Although this says something about Nurudin's character, about the source and strength of his convictions, I am not drawing attention to this in order to analyse his psychological motivations, but in order to remind the reader of the framework of Nurudin's confession: Death and the Dervish begins and finishes with Nurudin's disbelief in god, and in the metaphysical and ethical order which god's existence guarantees. When as a qadi Nurudin regains his faith, it is just a hiatus, a moment of vacillation, comparable to a moment of religious crisis in the life of a firm believer, after which balance is restored: Nurudin goes to his death without any belief in god or justice.
Ahmed Nurudin loses his faith in god and justice when his earthly dealings take a wrong turn: when his brother is imprisoned and his efforts to find out why this happened prove unsuccessful. He regains his faith in god and justice when his social standing improves—notwithstanding his brother's death, which could not be undone—and when he himself becomes a qadi, a judge, an earthly representative of god's justice. At the very end of the novel, Ahmed Nurudin once more loses his faith, and this coincides with his earthly dealings taking a wrong turn again—this time a fatally wrong turn. Although this says something about Nurudin's character, about the source and strength of his convictions, I am drawing attention to this not in order to analyze his psychological motivations, but in order to remind the reader of the framework of Nurudin's confession: Death and the Dervish begins and ends with Nurudin's disbelief in god, and in the metaphysical and ethical order which god's existence guarantees. When as a qadi Nurudin regains his faith, it is just a hiatus,
a moment of vacillation, comparable to a moment of religious crisis in the life of a firm believer, after which balance is restored: Nurudin goes to his death without any belief in god or justice.
The novel's title, however, is neither God and the Dervish nor Justice and the Dervish, but Death and the Dervish. Here, both god and justice have an important but, compared to death, only subordinate place. How are we to understand the death of Selimović's title? Despite the period decor of the novel, it is a modern death, death as understood by a nihilist. When after losing his faith Nurudin contemplates death for the first time, he says, "And then nothing happens; nothing is; then happens nothing. Nothing, whatever" (Selimović 1982, 195). Nothing follows: neither a meeting with the maker, who is not there to be met, nor a reward nor punishment. And when the prospect of death becomes real, Nurudin quivers in horror: "No, not in any way! Whatever may come, I want to live, standing on one foot until death, on a cliff edge until death, but I want to live!" (374). At the very end, after he has given up resisting, he writes this sentence, which has been much commented upon: "For death is absurd, as much as life is" (390). It strikes one as unusual that someone arriving at this conclusion feels the need to write it down. If life and death are equally absurd, there is little reason to add this sentence to the general sum of absurdity: it seems easier, more logical and consistent, to abstain from it. Nurudin does not abstain from writing down this sentence because it is the final point of his life's journey, the last insight he achieves, the conclusion to the long confession which makes up Death and the Dervish, the truth of which he had not been aware when he began writing his confession. And after writing down this sentence he, quite consistently with its meaning, puts his pen aside and stops writing. There is nothing to add to this conclusion. Moreover, it makes everything said and written beforehand seem meaningless.
Why does Nurudin confess and to whom is his confession addressed?
This question can only be answered with reference to the confessional genre's history and its transformations in the modern age. The founding text of the genre is Augustine's The Confessions, in which the author transformed the Neoplatonic genre of soliloquy by introducing the instance of a superaddressee, as Mikhail Bakhtin would put it, to whom the confession is addressed. Augustine simultaneously addresses god and celebrates him, both meanings being present in the Latin word confessiones: praise of god and confession of sins. In the first nine books of The Confessions, Augustine narrates the wandering of his godless soul, and in the remaining four, which follow from the moment of his conversion, he situates his life—and consequently every human life—in a comprehensive cosmic order which gives it its real meaning and significance. A confession is a record of conversion and repentance: Augustine confesses his misconceptions, his ignorance of this world's truth. Although the moment of conversion appears as his life's caesura, and as the structural focus of his confession, the ethical meaning of his confession is contained in the connection between conversion and death. The confession depends on Augustine's trust in the idea of mercy: do with me whatever you want—says Augustine to god—take my life, which I owe to you anyway; I am surrendering myself to your mercy with full confidence, and know that you will do with me only what is best. The Confessions thus resembles an extensive contract about restored ownership: the tenant has realized that the property he had considered his own did not belong to him at all, and he is returning it to its rightful owner. He does it joyfully and with confidence, and in the belief that by restoring its ownership he will be able to save the property he has been using, that the rightful owner knows best what should be done with the property, and that in the future the tenant can be spared wandering and searching for answers. Now he knows the answer to the riddle of life and certifies it with this confessional contract. He understandably expects from the confession further benefits for himself: for example, that the one who ultimately owns all properties will in his infinite mercy provide him with favorable, permanent accommodation when this temporary one vanishes. Why should all this not remain private, as something between him and god? Why does it need to be certified in this form and offered to everyone to read? Perhaps hermits do it this way—through an oral contract with god—but Augustine confesses publicly in order to be followed: "Why, then, do I tell you all these stories of mine?" asks Augustine of his god, immediately providing an answer: "Surely not that you should learn them from me. Rather I raise up towards you my mind and the minds of those who read all this, so that together we may say: Great is the Lord and worthy of high praise"(Augustine 2001, 261). His confession is an address to god with a plea for mercy, and simultaneously an address to the reader with a proposition to follow the author. He can and should be followed because his life trajectory presents a transition from evil to good, and because his transformation from a negative into a positive hero simultaneously cancels out death.
At the beginning of the modern age, Rousseau's The Confessions repeats Augustine's gesture of appealing to god's mercy and cancelling out death: "Let the last trump sound when it will," says Rousseau at the beginning of his book, "I shall come forward with this work in my hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge, and proclaim aloud: 'Here is what I have done.' […] I have displayed myself as I was, as vile and despicable when my behavior was such, as good, generous, and noble when I was so" (Rousseau 1953, 17). Even so, sinful and innocent at the same time, Rousseau is certain that at the last judgement there will be no man better than him, and that god will realize this too. It is not by accident that Rousseau mimics the structure of Augustine's The Confessions: two-thirds of the way into the book he experiences a revelation, a moment when under an oak—as Augustine under his fig tree—Rousseau realizes what has brought humanity to such a dire state and begins to write his treatises in order to reveal this insight to the whole world. As in Augustine's case, this moment divides his life into a before and an after, but unlike his predecessor, Rousseau's conversion is entirely secular. It leads him out of a state of tranquillity and calmness, and ushers him into a permanent war with others, a war which makes everything that preceded his conversion look like a heaven from which he has fallen into a world of evil and sin—into what in his revelation he had recognized as the very cause of the moral decay of humanity. As opposed to Augustine, Rousseau sees his life before the revelation as a state of innocence. Both confessions are exemplary in the sense that they use two human lives in order to present two different philosophies of history. While Augustine's leads from a life of sin to redemption in faith, thus turning a negative hero into a positive one, Rousseau's leads from primal innocence to sinfulness, and from a positive hero to one entangled in the negativity of this world. Rousseau, however, never loses the conviction he expresses at the beginning of the book, that in spite of everything he is innocent, that all his readers will be able to verify this, and that the "higher being" will be able to recognize it at the moment when Rousseau's death or eternal life is deliberated. His confession is addressed to his readers as much as to the "higher being," as evidence supplied to every human and every divine court.
Closer to our time, the same structure is replicated in the confession of Meursault, the hero of Camus's novel The Outsider. This brief novel seems hardly able to withstand a comparison with Augustine's and Rousseau's confessions, but there is more than one reason to attempt it. While Selimović's familiarity with Augustine's and Rousseau's books need not be presumed— although the familiarity of European readers with the broader philosophical and theological conceptions which these writers illustrate can be taken for granted given that these pervade European culture and can be learned from its other narratives—his familiarity with Camus's work is certain and has already been acknowledged in the literature on Selimović (Prohić 1972, 62 and 114). He seems to have intentionally left an indication of it in Death and the Dervish when he referred to Ishak as a "pobunjeni čovijek" (85) instead of the more usual "pobunjenik," thus repeating the effect which Camus already achieved in the title of his book L'Homme révolté (1951). The Outsider is Meursault's fictional confession not because it is a first-person narrative— as are many other novels, but which still do not qualify as confessions—but because it thematically and structurally follows the rules of this genre. It is fictional because it is difficult to imagine a man such as Meursault wanting to record his soul's vacillations regarding god, justice, and death, and moreover, wanting to do so until his very last hour, when the door opens to the execution site. And it is a confession because Meursault, from the moment of his "revelation" onwards—which is here, as in Augustine's and Rousseau's books, located in the last third of the book—does not talk about anything else. His "conversion" is initiated by the proximity of death, and does not consist in the approximating or surrendering to god of this religiously indifferent man, but in his becoming aware and formulating the feeling with which he has lived all his life, and which during his conversion is transformed into a conviction worth sharing with others.
Before meeting the priest, Meursault vacillates between two feelings: on the one hand, life is not worth living; on the other, he is thrilled by the opportunity of living for 20 more years, which he would have had, had he not been sentenced to death. Life becomes a value only when compared with death, which annihilates it. For death is sheer nothingness: there is nothing either above or behind it. The priest offers him the prospect of eternal posthumous damnation or redemption, a prospect which determines values: something becomes a value if it brings us closer to redemption, and a non-value if it does not. From this perspective, life is only a means of earning the other, eternal life, and can be justified only from this point of view. Meursault does not accept this perspective, as he does not believe that there is a god to guarantee its truth. As there is no god to whom he can address this confession, there is no sin either. Without the perspective of eternal damnation or redemption, everything in life becomes equally valuable, or equally valueless. It does not matter what he does and how he lives, as long as he can live longer. Realizing this, receiving his own revelation, Meursault transfers this thought onto his mother: in her last hours she must have felt, thinks Meursault, equally liberated and prepared to relive her life. This demand that life should return the same as it was, perhaps that it should eternally return as the same, is the highest possible affirmation of human life and at the same time the most radical criticism of all religions based on the idea of otherworldliness. Now free from fear and hope, Meursault discovers his divine freedom and wants only to be: there is no good or evil, one should live not better, but longer. And if there is no god to decide what the meaning of life and its values are, then man is god. This is Meursault's "good news," the gospel of the new human freedom which he wants to pass on to others: this is why he hopes to be accompanied with cries of hatred on his way to the execution site, as Christ was seen off in his suffering—a suffering which was the condition of his truth's triumph. Paradoxically, Meursault hopes to be able to annihilate the meaning of Christ's message through imitatio Christi.
It transpires that The Outsider is not far off from Augustine's Confessions when the focal points of the genre are at stake. Meursault also develops from a negative to a positive hero: from an ethically indifferent murderer, he becomes a preacher of a new belief in life, a belief which prefers immanence to transcendence; from a vacillator who does not ask many essential questions, he becomes after his revelation a preacher and a knower. The difference is, of course, that what was revealed to Meursault does not condemn his previous life and does not call for repentance, but affirms it with a request for it to return such as it was. And through this request Meursault defines death in a different way: instead of being an entrance into a supposedly real, otherworldly life, death becomes a negative certification of earthly life's value. Far from being absurd, death is a condition of meaningfulness: only when facing death does Meursault discover the priceless value of life. And as in Augustine's and Rousseau's books, the moral meaning of the text also relies on the connection between revelation, conversion, and death. Conversion occurs when one is facing death, as the result of one's need to prepare for it, as a grounding in our own individual way of dying. Meursault's confession is not addressed to any superaddressee, because no such instance exists; however, since in Meursault's world the place of the superaddressee is taken by man, by other people, Meursault's confession counts on followers even more than those of Augustine and Rousseau. His confession strives to become an exemplary story that will teach others, who have not yet experienced their own revelations, how to face death.
What is gained when Selimović's novel Death and the Dervish is read as a confession?
The novel has the form of a "found manuscript" or, to be more precise, "found confession," and invites a reading in which it will be interpreted through the prism of this genre. In order to be productive, such an interpretation must identify the genre's main features within it, and examine their transformations. We have seen that a confession must comprise an address to god with a justification of one's life, and an address to followers with a recommendation to follow the same life path. The modern versions of the genre, such as Camus's The Outsider, merge these two addresses into one: as the place of divinity is taken by humans, the address to followers is simultaneously the address to god. Furthermore, a confession must comprise a clear distinction between a positive and a negative life form, and either the transformation of the negative into a positive one, or, as in Rousseau and Camus, recognition of the past life, or at least a part of it, as positive. Also, a confession must comprise an instant of revelation, or a conversion, an announcement of true knowledge to the one who confesses. And most importantly, this revelation must be directed towards death.
Ahmed Nurudin begins ceremoniously, announcing his own record about himself, an inner dialogue put on paper—a soliloquy, the precursor of the confession—which will help him to find "some solution," to see himself "in the process of becoming," changing and metamorphosing. The beginning of his confession seems to come after his conversion—to be more precise, his de-conversion—because at that stage Ahmed Nurudin appears as a no-longer-believer. For a brief moment, he also seems to have found peace with the faith which he had lost, and even wonders how it was possible that he ever questioned it, but this moment does not last and does not bring any change: this is merely the moment of a failed conversion, and Nurudin concludes his confession in the same state in which he began writing it.
There is also another possibility of interpreting Ahmed Nurudin. Conversion and de-conversion are radically different: while the former leads one into an understanding of the world, of one's place in it, and of death, the latter only leads one out of it, without offering anything in return. At the very beginning of the novel Nurudin is without any convictions, which he has lost, and still in need of fortifying his new understanding of the world, himself, and death. He is in search of a revelation. Throughout the whole story there is only one—albeit repeated several times—intimation that Nurudin might find a passage leading from negative self-understanding, which he has rejected, through the void in which he finds himself, into a positive understanding of the world and himself, and into an acceptance of death which will result from it. This passage seems to be offered by his new friend Hasan. He appears to be someone who already knows the secret Nurudin is looking for. Let us call this secret "Hasanism."
Nurudin himself, and very eloquently, explains what attracts and repulses him in "Hasanism." "I liked order, strictness, that which is becoming to a dervish," he says, "everything must be in its proper place, one must create order, or lose one's mind" (109). Hasan agrees with him that such a world would be desirable but does not believe that this world could withstand the imposition of any strict order: "It would be good if we could determine aims and intentions, and create rules for all circumstances in life, and establish an imagined order. It is easy to invent general prescriptions, looking above people's heads, into the sky and eternity. But try to apply them to real people, whom you know and possibly care for, and not to hurt them in the process. I doubt you'll succeed" (110). Nurudin believes that being must be characterized by order, neatness, system, and axiomatic thinking, and that those who accept disorder, messiness, lack of system, and chaos, are undoubtedly living in a false, insufficiently understood world. A man who aligns his thinking and behavior with the truth of the world, thinks Nurudin, must be a man of order, axioms, consistency, a calculating and pedantic man, akin to a bureaucrat— exactly what Hasan was in Istanbul and what Nurudin becomes at the end of his life. Hasanists, on the contrary, do not believe in objective structures, eternal values, and meanings established once and for all. They think that structures must be constantly created, values affirmed, and interpretations produced, and that it is better to remain in an unfinished system with open horizons of meaning, than live in a dogmatic, fortified, and closed world. The greatest source of Hasan's charm and attraction for Nurudin is his ability to live without the security offered by any stable and determined horizon—and at the same time this is what Nurudin finds most repulsive in him: "Rest for a while, for god's sake, define yourself, find a firm footing. You are insecure in everything" (278). One must tongue and groove life's whirling "in order to stay sane" (277), thinks Nurudin.
From this point on, one could easily and simply continue in the direction charted by Nietzsche's interpretation of nihilism—which some words from the previous paragraph explicitly recall—and maintain that Nurudin's anxiety consists of his gradual acceptance of the position of passive nihilism, while Hasan is from the very beginning a joyful and active nihilist. Although this description may not be totally misplaced with regards to Nurudin, especially if we have in mind his final conclusion about the meaning of life and death, Hasan certainly is not a nihilist. He is something substantially less pretentious than an active nihilist: Hasan is a man who composed his horizon of meaning out of inconsistency and transitoriness.
Inconsistency here refers to the opposite of Nurudin's demand for metaphysical, axiological, and ethical order, similar to its interpretation in Leszek Kołakowski's essay "In Praise of Inconsistency." Consistent is a man who, maintains Kolakowski, "having at his disposal a certain number of general principles, carefully sees to it that all he does and all he thinks should be done in absolute agreement with these general principles" (Kolakowski 1977, 201). However, Kolakowski warns that absolute consistency is in practice identical to fanaticism, and leads to tragic conflicts, because the world of social values is not a world of two-value logic: "there exist values that are mutually exclusive without ceasing to be values," which makes choosing between them impossible (204). While consistency demands that we make a choice between values of equal worth, inconsistent people refuse to choose between mutually exclusive values. "Inconsistency is simply a hidden awareness of the contradiction of this world," claims Kolakowski (204). In Death and the Dervish Selimović shows that inconsistent people, such as Hasan, are the source of tolerance which is a great deal more benevolent towards others and life in general, than the practical fanaticism of adherence to only one and consistently enforced principle: Hasan refuses to hastily disentangle a love triangle between the three servants in his household, and awaits an opportunity in which a solution will appear all by itself, so that no one is completely defeated. This does not mean that inconsistent people are weak: in extreme situations, such as war, killing, torture, where those who cannot defend themselves are mistreated, inconsistency becomes untenable. This is where, Kolakowski claims, every inconsistency comes to an end, as Hasan shows with his passionate care for the rebels in Posavina. Here we see a man caring more for life and values, and especially for real individual people, than those, such as Ahmed Nurudin, who insist on making their home in the so-called essential principles. Hasan is nowhere fully at home, neither in Istanbul nor in Bosnia, and accepts always being on the road: as a cattle driver, which is his trade, but also as a metaphysical wanderer. This refusal to make one's home in a sole principle or in one exclusive value, this inconsistency which Nurudin finds so reprehensible, actually saves Hasan. Instead of—like Nurudin—adhering to one theoretical system of redemption even after it is proven to be an apparatus of death, Hasan can jump off it as soon as it shows the first signs of being insufficient and faulty. In the meantime, Hasan can find temporary shelters in love: love for his father, for the women from Dubrovnik, for hadži-Sinanudin, for the people from Posavina, even for Ahmed Nurudin. He certainly knows better than Nurudin how one should live: he is more aware of the contradictory nature of values between which we must choose, he understands human nature better than the dervish, and does not seem to spend sleepless nights worrying about essential principles. Hasan shows that the spontaneous, passionate aspect of life is the only real life we have. However, Hasan is not an active nihilist; in Selimović's work, such a figure is more easily identified in Ahmed Šaba, the poet from Selimović's novel The Fortress.
So, Hasan knows better than Nurudin how one should live, but does he also know how one should die? For Hasan will one day die too; whether hard or soft, brave or timid, dervishes or cattle drivers—everyone dies. How do Hasanists die? Selimović offered Nurudin conversion to Hasanism in the last hours of his life, and thus the opportunity to redeem his sin of loving principles more than people, by introducing him to his son. This is one of those moments when the negative hero of a confession has a unique opportunity to transform himself into a positive one, such as Augustine or Meursault, and to become the preacher of a new wisdom—of Hasanism, an inconsistency which refuses to settle for anything but love for life and others. The Hasanists, the people without faith, have no god to whom they can surrender their life— which is not theirs anyway—and do not believe that the real owner of their lives will compensate them in return by granting them another, eternal life. Their love for life, their adherence to it, they pass these on to those whom they love; they invest their love for life into love for the lives of those whom they love. And thus Hasanists love life itself, even if it is to be lived by someone else. The Hasanists love those who will survive them. This is how they make death, the entrance into nothingness, less absurd, and even life itself begins to seem more meaningful if it is possible to see a man's longing to last, even standing on one foot on a cliff edge, as Nurudin once thought, fulfilled in loved ones who survive us, even if only for a brief while. This could have been Nurudin's last insight, his conversion at the end of his tortured life: the conversion to Hasanism, confessed in order to pass it on to others.
This is the idea which in his many interviews Meša Selimović kept explaining as the meaning of the novel Death and the Dervish, until his interpreters and readers began repeating it with similar conviction. However, the hero of this confession does not seem to be seduced by this idea; on the contrary, he seems to reject it explicitly. We should presume that Nurudin writes down the episode about meeting his son during his last hour: he is already in the tekke, the guards are in front of his door, the boy is sleeping in the room next door, only dawn is awaited so that Nurudin can go to his death. Camus's Meursault uses the time immediately before his execution to explicate his philosophy, which he unconsciously lived all his life, and to proclaim it to others. A more privileged place for it is hard to imagine: the end of life, the end of confession; when should the most significant message be sent if not now? It is unlikely that by writing down this episode Nurudin is simply killing time: very soon for him time will be no more, and he knows this. On the other hand, there is nothing in this episode which demands that it be narrated by Nurudin himself. Apart from the sentence in which Nurudin says that he is incapable of tenderness—which is already obvious in his treatment of the boy—there is in it no representation of Nurudin's thoughts and feelings, which only he could reveal. If it necessarily must be here, this episode could have been written by Hasan, who could have learned of it from the boy, while Nurudin could have spent his last hour contemplating the absurdity of all human actions, including writing confessions. Selimović, however, wanted Nurudin to write until the very last moment, and his last words to be the description of an event which—significantly more strongly than his last sentence about the absurdity of life—testifies to the inconsolable thought with which he goes into his death. There is no conversion into Hasanism. Before the horror of death not even loved ones offer any shelter. Investing one's love for life into love for the lives of others, and thus loving life itself, loving those who survive us and thus making death, the entry into nothingness, less absurd—this is just a list of figures of speech and nothing else. One dies, inconsolably and irrevocably. Ahmed Nurudin is consistent until the very end and will not go into nothingness until he has explained the final insight offered him by this world. This is one additional antinomy in Death and the Dervish: the author is trying to convince us that the novel's message is the importance of love and tenderness, but his hero, who narrates the novel, comes to the opposite conclusion—that compared with death, neither love nor tenderness mean much at all.
Why does, then, Nurudin confess until his very last moment, and to whom? He has no god to whom he can offer his life and ask for mercy and forgiveness. He does not address others with a request to be followed. Although he divides his life into several parts—his youth, when he was capable of love and tenderness, his maturity, empty of love and tenderness, and devoted to god and faith, and the last year of his life, in which he lost his faith without regaining the ability to love—Nurudin does not establish any hierarchy between them, and the reader cannot decide which of them is "positive" and which is "negative." Moreover, by declining the love and tenderness offered to him in his eleventh hour, Nurudin very explicitly prevents readers from projecting their own values into his life and from declaring the time of love and tenderness as the "positive" time of his life, compared to which everything else would be a distancing from salvation. He also declines the conversion to Hasanism: he would much rather become a qadi, and start over with order, neatness, system, and axiomatic thinking, all of this based on the faith he had already lost, and which he will not be able to regain. There is no revelation which in confessions fuels the transition from the negative into positive life. Of all things that a confession, whether traditional or modern, has to demonstrate, Nurudin's preserves only this: without god, without any followers, without a revelation and a transition from negative into positive, Ahmed Nurudin keeps confessing, and his confession is directed towards death. There are, after all is said and done, only these two things in Death and the Dervish: a narrated confession and death.
This brings us to what this deeply nihilistic novel—whose last sentence sounds like an invitation to suicide—tells us about the destiny of those who are unable to convert, who know that after all is said and done, everyone must die alone: the way they prepare their own individual manner of dying.
Hasan also knows that there is some connection between narrating and dying, and explains this in his story about a Višegrad widow who lost her son. She mourns her only child, and silently courts death. Deceived by Hasan, who lies to her that he knew her son in order to pull her out of silence, she begins to narrate about the deceased: she not only stops mourning him while narrating, as she "saw him perfect and alive" in her story (276), she moreover stops courting her own death (276–77). Her existence, up to this moment directed towards death, becomes filled up with narrative fiction, by words which bring back to life the departed youth—but it also becomes filled up with life which does not want to cease. Life comes back to her when she begins telling the story of her dead son. This narration is also directed towards death, because it comes out of the necessity to come to terms with (another's) death, but its outcome is the production of life in the narrator. That she dies three years later does not change anything in this conclusion: she dies accidentally, or out of necessity, as everyone dies, whether hard or soft, brave or timid, a dervish or a cattle driver. However, she lived a further three years thanks to her own stories, instead of lying with a heavy stone on her chest and courting death. With this story Hasan testifies that a narration directed towards death neither courts nor averts death, but that it produces life.
Nurudin also begins his confession when death casts its shadow on him: after the murder of his brother, which makes him lose his faith in the one who shields us from death. His confession is initially led by his need to introduce order, neatness, and system, lost from his life together with the foothold provided by faith: "to find some solution in the final reckoning" and in the hope that "in the hooks of letters a part of me will be preserved, that it won't keep vanishing in whirls of mist, as if it never were, or as if I didn't know what it was" (11). Hung on the hooks, these clouds of life's mist will be ready for inspection, and some sort of order and system will be obvious in them—for there must be some order and system even in the lives which are not directed by the order which god introduced into this world. However, his confession escapes this intention and begins to live its own life; it is not interrupted—merely slowed down—even when the newly appointed qadi temporarily rediscovers order, neatness, and system. Once set in motion, his confession acquires a new purpose: "There is still too much life in my heart […] Perhaps because I write this: I am not dejected, I avert death," writes Nurudin at the very end (388). "I am not lying with a heavy stone on my chest: I live." He does not say "I write because there is still life in me which demands to be confessed," he says that there is still life in him because of his writing and as long as he writes. Similarly to the widow from Hasan's story, his writing directed towards death produces life. Confronted with death's nothingness, even others, no matter how much they are loved, do not offer any shelter; it is offered by writing, narrating, confessing, which until the last moment fills one's heart with life.
References
Augustine. 2001. The Confessions. London: Everyman Publishers.
Hodel, Robert. 2004. "Antinomien in Selimovićs Roman Der Derwisch und der Tod." In Mundus narratus, edited by R. Hansen-Kokoruš and A. Richter, 261–76. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Kołakowski, Leszek. 1977. "In Praise Of Inconsistency." Dissent 11 (2): 201–09.
Prohić, Kasim. 1972. Činiti i biti. Sarajevo.
Ricoeur, Paul. 2009. Living Up to Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1953. The Confessions. Translated by J. M. Cohen. London: Penguin.
Selimović, Meša. 1982. Derviš i smrt. Belgrade: Nolit.
All references given in text are to this edition.
The essay appeared in Serbian translation in Kolakowski's book Filozofski eseji (Belgrade: Nolit, 1964).
For more on this, see Ricoeur 2009, 42.
On the antinomies in Selimović's novel, see Hodel 2004, 261–76.
66 Zoran Milutinović
What the Dervish Confessed about Death 77
