SOURCE: Morgan, Peter. “Ancient Names … Marked by Fate: Ethnicity and the ‘Man without Qualities’ in Ismail Kadare's Palace of Dreams.” European Legacy 7, no. 1 (February 2002): 45-60.

[In the following essay, Morgan examines the role of ethnicity in The Palace of Dreams, concluding that Kadare utilizes “ethnicity as a central factor of social change in post-communist societies.”]

INTRODUCTION¹

The Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare made a radical break with the tradition of socialist realism in his novel, The Palace of Dreams.² In this work, published in Tirana in 1981 and banned shortly afterwards, Kadare identifies ethnicity as a category of social and individual identity in the context of communist Central and Eastern Europe and thereby foregrounds ethnicity as a central factor of social change in post-communist societies. Kadare uses Albanian ethnic identity to thematize the “Balkan syndrome” of imperial domination in which minority ethnic identity is at once repressed and perpetuated. He does so by tracing the crisis of identity of a typically “Eastern European” bureaucrat and “man without qualities,” in an allegorical Ottoman Empire at the end of the last century. However, while Kadare's novel takes place in an imagined late Ottoman Empire called the UOS (United Ottoman States), there is little of the colour of Istanbul or the Ottoman Empire in this novel. It reads very much as an allegory of post-war Central and Eastern Europe.

THE PALACE OF DREAMS

Kadare's hero, Mark-Alem, is the pampered and protected scion of a ruling caste family of Albanian origins. For generations the Quprili family have served the Sultan as viziers, government officials and bureaucrats of the Empire. The name Quprili, derived from the Slav word meaning “bridge,” refers to the family's association with a “bridge with three arches in central Albania, constructed in the days when the Albanians were still Christians and built with a man walled up in its foundations.” After the bridge was finished, one of the builders and founding ancestor of the family adopted after his first name, Gjon, the name of Ura (bridge) “together with the stigma of murder attached to it” (9).³

Mark-Alem is about to start work in the Tabir Sarrail or Palace of Dreams, a ministry of the Sultan responsible for collecting the dreams of the Empire and analysing them for signs of social or political unrest:

The idea behind the Sovereign's creation of the Tabir is that Allah looses a forewarning dream on the world […] the interpretation of that dream, fallen like a stray spark into the brain of one out of millions of sleepers, may help to save the country or its Sovereign from disaster; may help to avert war or plague or to create new ideas. […] All that is murky and harmful, or that will become so in a few years or centuries, makes its first appearance in men's dreams.

(19-20)

The hierarchy of the Palace of Dreams extends from the Copying rooms and Archives below, to the offices of Selection and Interpretation above. Mark-Alem is soon promoted from his first position where he selects dreams for further attention, to providing interpretations of potential Master-Dreams, the most significant of the thousands of dreams which flow in each week from throughout the Empire. “The road to the heights in the Tabir Sarrail passes through Interpretation” (69), Mark-Alem is told shortly after his promotion, and later his uncle confirms that “whoever controls the Palace of Dreams controls the keys of the State” (113). The Master-Dreams are the basis for the political decisions of the Empire.

This mechanism of control is made palatable for the people through a myth of altruism and reward. A legend tells about “some poor wretch who lived in a forgotten byway and whose dream saved the State from a terrible calamity.” In reward he is offered one of the Sultan's nieces in marriage (39). The reality is different: the dreamer of the “Master-Dream” is subjected to interrogation, torture and finally death in the state's relentless pursuit of control.

That must be the real object of his incarceration: to make him forget it. That wearing interrogation night and day, that interminable report, the pretence of seeking precise details about something that by its very nature cannot be definite—all this, continued until the dream begins to disintegrate and finally disappears completely from the dreamer's memory, could only be called brain-washing, thought Mark-Alem. Or an undream, in the same way as unreason is the opposite of reason. […] It must be a question of flushing out subversive ideas which for some reason or other the State needed to isolate, as one isolates a plague virus in order to be able to neutralise it.

(83-4)

The huge process of instrumentalization of the dreams of the Empire is a satire on the types of control through cultural and ideological avenues typical of the Eastern European communist dictatorships. Like George Orwell's Ministry of Truth in 1984, it is a massive and powerful state organ in control of the mass unconsciousness of the Empire. In Kadare's hands the Palace becomes an allegory of the ways in which Central and Eastern European communist dictatorships functioned: the murky power-structures, the instrumentalization of myth and legend in the service of ideology, the creation of a ruling class or nomenklatura, the bureaucratization of human relationships and the insecurity, anxiety and fear which this gives rise to, the ostentatious display of order and stability in a situation in which power-structures no longer have a rational base, where change occurs as the result of “seismic” eruptions among factions, where civil society as a binding and mediating force is absent, and where the individual is a cipher in the algebra of power.

THE QUPRILI DREAM

Mark-Alem's influential family is responsible for placing him at the Palace. However from the beginning he is unsure of himself and his new environment. The administration and the functions of the organization are opaque. The process of selection and assignment of duties is mysterious, as is the rationale for his accelerated promotions. Mark-Alem's family is powerful, but their relations with the Palace and with the Sultan himself have been strained, even adversarial in the past. In the first weeks of his employment, Mark-Alem's uncle, the Vizier, warns him that the bureaucracy of the Tabir is corrupt and that “dreams” are planted by those in power in order to damage their enemies. The Quprili family itself, it turns out, has been the object of such attacks in the past:

“Some people,” the Vizier went on, “think it's the world of anxieties and dreams—your world, in short—that governs this one. I myself think it's from this world that everything is governed. I think it's this world that chooses the dreams and anxieties and imaginings that ought to be brought to the surface, as a bucket draws water from a well. […] It's this world that selects what it wants from the abyss. […] They say the Master-Dream is sometimes a complete fabrication,” he whispered. “Has that ever occurred to you?” Mark-Alem went cold with fright. A fabrication? The Master-Dream? He could never have imagined a human mind daring to think such a thing, let alone say it in so many words.

(116-7)

Shortly after commencing work, Mark-Alem's attention is taken by the dream of a local fruit-seller:

A piece of wasteland by a bridge, the sort of vacant lot where people throw rubbish. Amongst all the trash and dust and bits of broken lavatory, a curious musical instrument playing all by itself, except for a bull that seems to be maddened by the sound and is standing by the bridge and bellowing […]

(45)

He initially consigns it to the Archives. But then he changes his mind, sending it to Interpretation in the fear that he might have missed something. After he has been promoted to “Interpretation” the dream turns up again, but he is still puzzled by it, despite his uncle's warning.

Wasn't the bridge connected with his family's own name? […] Perhaps this was some sinister omen? He re-read the text and began to breathe more freely again: the bull wasn't really attacking the bridge at all. It was just rushing around the piece of waste ground. It's a dream without any meaning, he thought.

(89)

Ironically, he recognizes that the dream could be of significance, if the bull were attacking the bridge—but it is not. In his literal-mindedness he misses the clue. With its lahuta, the bridge and the raging bull, this dream turns out to be of great importance, signifying to the “powers that be” in the Palace of Dreams a threat from the Quprilis.

Mark-Alem fails miserably in not recognizing the importance of the dream of the three-arched bridge. However his failure can perhaps be better understood in context. Most of the dreams he is given are extremely suggestive, and could be interpreted to indicate ethnic unrest or changing power-relations in the Empire. Mark-Alem never realizes this, and hence does not learn the central lesson that his uncle is trying to teach him, namely that he must be on guard against any dream which specifically points towards the Quprilis, because it will most probably have been planted in a political manoeuvre to unseat the family.

Mark-Alem's responses to his family, his career and his place of employment have been marked from the beginning by fear and intimidation. He is continually afraid that he will make a mistake and miss a vital clue, or will show himself too ignorant or too knowledgeable and hence suspect to his superiors. When warned by his uncle, the Vizier and Foreign Minister to the Sultan, of the machinations and intrigues behind the scenes in the Palace, his response is to plead for rescue: “Mark-Alem had an almost irresistible desire to fling himself at the Vizier's feet and implore him: ‘Get me out of there, uncle! Save me!’” (117). His obtuseness comes about as a result of his desire not to know, which has its roots in his family history. From his earliest childhood he remembers the crises and tragedies of the family as individual members were catapulted into favour and the highest offices or fell to disgrace, imprisonment and execution, and his mother's main aim since his father's death has been to protect her only son from this destiny (52f).

ALBANIAN EPIC AND ETHNIC IDENTITY

The dream of the three-arched bridge links Mark-Alem's position at work to his family. For centuries the Quprilis have celebrated their power and influence in the Empire by inviting Bosnian Serb bards to visit the capital and recite a heroic song in which the deeds of this Muslim family are glorified. Mark-Alem's memories of this ritual go back to his earliest childhood:

[…] at first he'd imagined the epos, as they called it, as a long thin animal, midway between a hydra and a snake, which lived far away in some snowy mountains, and which, like a beast of fable, carried within its body the fate of the family.

(58)

This epic is a provocation to the Sultan. It manifests the Quprilis' power and pedigree as a Muslim Ottoman family and has been the source of contention and conflict in the past. At a family gathering Mark-Alem's uncle, Kurt, announces that he has invited some rhapsodists from Albania to recite the Albanian version of the epic at the forthcoming annual celebration. Kurt is a very different type to his serious, career-minded siblings.

He had fair hair, and with his light-coloured eyes, reddish moustache and half-German, half-Albanian name, Kurt, he was regarded as the wild rose of the Quprili tribe. Unlike his brothers he had never stuck to any important job. He'd always gone in for strange occupations as brief as they were odd: at one time he'd devote himself to oceanography, at another to architecture, and lately it had been music. He was a confirmed bachelor, went riding with the Austrian consul's son, and was said to carry on a sentimental correspondence with several mysterious ladies. In short, he led a life that was as pleasant as it was frivolous, the absolute opposite of the lives led by his brothers.

(50)

Through the Albanian epic he introduces a new element of ethnicity to the power-relations between the Sultan and the Quprilis.⁴ For the Albanian epic, in which the Quprilis do not play a role, foregrounds the theme of Albanian over Ottoman identity. At this point Mark-Alem's uncles discuss the precarious balance in the family between Albanian ethnic identity and Ottoman political power. Albanians like themselves have used the power of the Ottomans to escape the limitations of their tiny land. Without the Ottomans they would:

lose all those other possibilities, […] the vast space in which they could fly like the wind, and be shut up in their own small territory. Their wings will be clipped, and they'll flap clumsily from one mountain to another until they're exhausted. Then they'll ask themselves, “What did we gain by it?”

(61-2)

Albanians, shqiptare or “sons of eagles,” are caged animals in the modern world unless they can break out of their mountain fastnesses.⁵ But this has brought with it complicity in the deeds of the Ottoman Empire, including the suppression of Albanian nationhood in the name of the Empire. Kurt accuses his family of having betrayed their Albanian roots for the sake of power.

We never discover whether Kurt is a bored rich playboy flirting with adventure and manipulated by the Austrians, or whether he has turned into a renegade intellectual and ethnic nationalist, hoping to liberate his “homeland” with the help of the Austrians. He certainly appears to have an agenda for national change:

“Anyhow,” said Kurt, “for the moment they don't say anything about us.”

“One day they'll understand us,” said the governor.

“But you just said they don't say anything.”

“Then we should listen to their silence,” said Kurt.

[…] “But we are in the Slav epic,” said Kurt.

“Isn't that enough?” […] “You said yourself that we're the only family in Europe and perhaps in the world that's celebrated in a national epic. Don't you think that's sufficient? Do you want us to be celebrated by two nations? You ask if that isn't enough for me,” said Kurt. “My answer is no!” […]

(62-3)

Kurt went on for some time, speaking with passion. He spoke again of the link between their family here and the Balkan epic there, and of the relations between government and art, the evanescent and the eternal, the flesh and the spirit […]

(64)

Up until this point the family has manipulated its Albanian identity for political purposes within the multinational empire. The theme of the Albanian versus the Serb epic introduces a new level of complexity, revealing the inconsistencies and the contradictions in the family's Albanian self-identification. For Kurt however, the issue is clear: the family has betrayed its Albanian roots.

Mark-Alem is present during these discussions at the end of chapter two. However he fails to make the link even now with the dream of the bridge, the lahuta and the bull. This dream, whether planted by enemies of the family or dreamt by a provincial from the western—Albanian—provinces of the Empire, alerts the Sultan to Kurt's new-found ethnicity, and leads him to suspect Kurt of fomenting ethno-national unrest and laying himself open to the influence of the Austrian Habsburgs sitting in the western wings of the Empire. Mark-Alem's failure to intercept this dream leads directly to the arrest and execution of Kurt, the humiliation of the Vizier, the assassination of the Albanian rhapsodists and the punitive expedition against Albania at the climax of the novel.

THE SOUL OF THE NATION

Surprisingly, given his passivity and lack of character, Mark-Alem is strongly conscious of his Albanian heritage. On the morning of his first day of work he goes into the library and peruses the family history stretching back to the building of the three-arched bridge in central Albania. We are told that he “set great store by his Albanian origins and automatically registered anything that concerned Albania” (41). Early in the novel an opposition is established between the life of the bureaucrat imprisoned in gloomy rooms along endless dimly-lit corridors behind the high walls of the Tabir Sarrail and the world of snow, rain and springtime blossoms which is associated with the Albania on whose soil Mark-Alem has never set foot, but whose name promises escape, freedom, and fulfilment.

[…] suddenly he looked up. He felt as if someone were hailing him from a long way away, sending out some strange, faint, doleful signal like a call for help or a sob. What is it? he wondered. The question soon absorbed him absolutely. Without knowing why, he looked at the high windows. It was the first time he'd done so. Beyond the window panes the rain, so familiar but now so distant, mingled as it fell with delicate flakes of snow. The flakes eddied wildly in the morning light, now distant too—so far away it seemed to belong to another life, another world from which perhaps that ultimate signal had been sent out to him.

(36-7)

This sense of longing for freedom is evoked throughout the novel and is set in contrast to the environment of the Tabir Sarrail. Later it is explicitly related to Mark-Alem's sense of ethnic identity, to the “lahuta in his breast.” Hence when Kurt introduces the topic of the Albanian epic and evokes the romanticism of lost homeland, he finds an avid, if naive, audience in his nephew. Mark-Alem is eager to hear the hitherto unknown Albanian version of the epic, in the hope that it will arouse the sense of solemnity and profundity which he misses in the familiar Serb version. He is initially disappointed that the instrument, the lahuta, is a simple single-stringed instrument no different to the Serb gusla, not the “strange, weighty, majestic and imposing” instrument he had imagined as necessary to accompany the solemnity of the subject matter. The music begins as a “long, too long, stifling lament,” redolent of death and eternity. But then a transformation occurs.

Mark-Alem couldn't take his eyes off the slender, solitary string stretched across the sounding box. It was the string that secreted the lament; the box amplified it to terrifying proportions. Suddenly it was revealed to Mark-Alem that this hollow cage was the breast containing the soul of the nation to which he belonged. It was from there that arose the vibrant age-old lament. He'd already heard fragments of it; only today would he be permitted to hear the whole. He now felt the hollow of the lahuta inside his own breast. […] Though his chest was constricted with tension, Mark-Alem suddenly felt an almost irresistible desire to discard “Alem,” the Asian half of his first name, and appear with a new one, one used by the people of his native land: Gjon, Gjergj or Gjorg. Mark-Gjon, Mark-Gergj Ura, Mark-Gjorg Ura, he repeated as if trying to get used to his new half-name, every time he heard the word “Ura,” the only one of the rhapsodist's words he could understand.

(151-2)⁶

At this point Mark-Alem undergoes an epiphanic experience, finding in the music of the lahuta the powerful expression of a hitherto unarticulated desire for freedom felt as ethnic belonging. Just as at the beginning the name in the ancient chronicle arouses his sense of kinship, he now feels the pull of his origins in the story and its music. This is highly ironic, of course, since the gusla and the lahuta are basically the same instrument with different names—the latter sharing its etymological root with the word lute, and the former having a Slavic derivation. The Slav epic which he has known since childhood as played on the gusla has not had this effect on him.

At the height of the recital, however, the Sultan strikes. Troops arrive to disperse the guests. Kurt is arrested, later to be executed, the Albanian rhapsodists are assassinated and the Vizier is publicly humiliated. At the same time as his past, undefined sense of ethnic Albanian identity and solidarity is given a focus, Mark-Alem sees his family ruined and himself put into danger. His private fantasy of freedom, ethnicity and self-determination is enacted before him as a scenario of humiliation, political intrigue, and murder.

Most importantly, he realizes that he himself has been unwittingly involved in the coup. The morning after the catastrophe, he returns to work to find that rumours are flying about the state of emergency, about the power-contest between the Quprilis and the Sultan, and about possible ramifications for the Palace and its staff. He waits for some dreadful fate to befall him, and discovers that the dream which he had twice held in his hands, and had been tempted to discard, was indeed the Master-Dream which alerted the Sultan to Kurt's activities. With its three-arched bridge, the lahuta playing in isolation, the raging bull and the desolate plot of land it pointed to the Quprilis, indicating their Albanian ethnic identity, suggesting their potential involvement in subversive political activity in far-off homelands, and identifying them as a dangerous force close to the seat of power. The presence of the Albanian rhapsodists was seen to have validated this interpretation of the dream, and the Sultan acted, as Mark-Alem witnessed the previous night, to forestall any dangerous political developments. Mark-Alem hears that a group of officials is being sent to the Balkans “to eliminate the Albanian epic, which is regarded as the cause of the whole trouble” (166).

At the Tabir Sarrail in the days following the blow against the Quprilis, gossip and anxiety are rife, but little happens. It is rumoured that the Sultan has sent back the Master Dream, rejecting it, or rejecting the interpretation of it. Mark-Alem fears that he will be punished, but then, some days later, further political ructions occur as soldiers are seen swarming through the courtyards of the Palace. Watching from a window above, Mark-Alem thinks of the family carriages with the letter “Q” on their doors rushing back and forward across the city, and it is whispered throughout the halls of the Palace that the Quprilis have retaliated. Just how this has occurred is not made clear, but

some confrontation, some secret and terrible exchange of blows has taken place in the darkest depths of the State. We've felt only the surface repercussions, as you do in an earthquake with a very deep hypocentre. […] during the night a terrible clash took place between the two rival groups, the two forces that counterbalance one another within the State. […] even we, who're at the very source of the mystery, are still in the dark.

(174)

It is implied that the Quprilis have powerful mining interests in distant provinces and that they have used these to strike back at the Sultan. But the nature of the conflict is never clarified (177).

THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES

The original Albanian title of the novel, Nëpunësi i pallatit te endrrave or The Employee of the Palace of Dreams, places emphasis on Mark-Alem rather than the Palace itself. His influential uncles brought about his appointment in the first place (17), but their role after that is not clear, and it is implied that Mark-Alem's presence in the Palace is desired by the powers that be for some sinister purpose (“You suit us” 43, 68). His rapid rise through the hierarchy of the Palace of Dreams, from initiate to director is never explained.

Being related to the Quprilis through his mother, Mark-Alem does not share their name. He has been a naive, passive and timid participant both in his family's political affairs and at work in the Palace of Dreams. Soon after the Vizier is toppled, however, Mark-Alem is unexpectedly promoted. And with his promotion a certain change comes about: he becomes important, taciturn and unapproachable, identifying “more and more with the sort of people he'd always liked least: the senior civil servants” (178). In the meantime Kurt is summarily executed. Mark-Alem still expects the fall-out from the coup against his family to affect him, but again he is promoted, this time to the position of First Assistant Director of the Palace of Dreams.

In his new position he returns to the Archives and reads through the Master-Dreams of the past months, from those dreamt on the eve of the Battle of Kosovo to “the fateful Master-Dream that had led his uncle to the grave and raised him, Mark-Alem, to be a director of the Tabir” (184). The city greengrocer who had the dream has been located, is interrogated over weeks and like his predecessor, whom Mark-Alem had seen carried out in a coffin earlier that year, disappears shortly afterward. With that, the coup seems over. Mark-Alem “never succeeded in clearing up the mystery of that night, with the attack on the Quprilis followed by their counter-attack” (184). Nor is his position ever clarified for the reader. It is unclear whether his promotion to the position of Acting Director General of the Tabir Sarrail is the result of his family's powerful counter-attack against the Sultan, or whether more insidious forces are at work. For while the family was instrumental in placing Mark-Alem in the Palace of Dreams to begin with, the Vizier makes it clear that the upper echelons of the Palace were powerfully against the interests of the Quprilis. But on the other hand, important changes have taken place in the leadership of the Palace, with Mark-Alem himself set to take over full control from his ailing Director General in the wake of the coup and the counter-attack. Mark-Alem now belongs among the most powerful of officials, responsible for the sleep and dreams of the whole Empire.

Mark-Alem is not a maverick like Kurt. Characterless and insipid, the classic Central European “man without qualities,” he is slow on the uptake but surprisingly accessible to the habitus of power once he finds himself in charge.⁷ After some months in his job he begins to prefer the environment of the Palace to the dreary and mundane world outside:

How tedious, grasping and confined this world [i.e. his everyday world outside the Tabir—PM] seemed in comparison with the one he now served!

(108)

By the end of the novel he has accustomed himself to the gestures of the powerful without having shown any comparable increase in understanding the way power has worked to further his interests. Moreover he will be the perfect tool of those who wield power because he is the instrument of his own humiliation. For if Mark-Alem represents the resurrection of the Quprili family fortunes in the Ottoman state, he does so under a very different mantle to his forebears. The political power represented in the figure of the Vizier has been dashed and will take time to reassert itself. The ethnic nationalism represented by Kurt has been dealt a body blow. Mark-Alem is deeply traumatized by the events surrounding Kurt's execution and his own involvement in the affair. He sees the result of political positioning, he recognizes his own role in the power-struggles, and most importantly he learns how dangerous his ethnic longings can be. By the end of the novel Mark-Alem will have internalized the structure of his own humiliation in repressing his desire for self-identity and projecting the frustration of his desires into an image of death and transfiguration.

For centuries power has changed hands as a result of intrigues, machinations, coups and palace revolts among factions of the ruling class around the court of the Sultan, but no structural change has taken place. In this closed civil-bureaucratic state-structure power is exercised from above, and the individual, such as Mark-Alem, born into a ruling class (or Nomenklatura), must internalize the rules of appropriation of power—including its gestures and habitus. In order to do so, he must become “characterless,” a “man without qualities,” since he must be ready to follow the dictates of power regardless of personality and personal allegiances (such as family etc.) In the works of Kafka, in particular The Trial and The Castle we see the middle-man, the individual who is sandwiched between the holders of power and those without power; in Orwell's 1984, likewise, we see in Winston Smith the middle-man as intellectual and member of the lower state apparatus, whose attempt to maintain a personality is at odds with his position in the power-structure of the state. Mark-Alem is born into the ruling caste of the Quprilis. He is a born “man without qualities” who discovers in himself a “quality”—his sense of Albanian ethnic identity—and who is faced with the existential choice in this closed society, to either become a renegade like his uncle Kurt, or to accede to the structures of power which infiltrate his innermost being, and to submit the sense of identity expressed in his dream of ethnicity to the demands of the state for complete subjugation. In facing this existential choice, Mark-Alem is one of the passive heroes of Central and Eastern European literature, whose life-options are already mapped out in advance by the power-structures of the state. He has no choice even in his privileged position, and Kadare, working within a post-enlightenment tradition of the individual, demonstrates in the figure of Mark-Alem the deformation of human character which takes place as a result of the suppression of individual dreams and longings in the service of total social control.

REPRESSION AND THE PERPETUATION OF ETHNIC IDENTITY

In, the meantime Spring has come around. Mark-Alem, now 28, arrives home one evening to find his uncles discussing his betrothal. Life has resumed its course. Returning to the family chronicle with which the novel began, Mark-Alem thinks back to the image of the falling snow in his ethnic homeland which has been the touchstone for his desire for freedom and personal integrity:

As for Albania […] It grew more and more distant and dim, like some far cold constellation, and he wondered if he really knew anything about what went on there […] He sat there uncertainly, his pen growing heavy in his hand, until finally it rested on the paper and instead of writing “Albania” wrote: There. He gazed at the expression that had substituted itself for the name of his homeland, and suddenly felt oppressed by what he immediately thought of as “Quprilian sadness.” It was a term unknown to any other language in the world, though it ought to be incorporated in them all.

(188-9)

Mark-Alem has learned his lesson: Albania, the romantic homeland, has become the undefined “there.” Suppression of identity leads to “Quprilian sadness,” the sense of loss felt by this dynasty which has traded ethnic identity for political power. “Quprilian sadness” is represented in this novel as having recurred throughout the history of the family's collaboration with the Ottoman Empire. It is linked with the theme of betrayal of Albania symbolized in the blood on the bridge, the immurement of the sacrificial victim, and in the family's name-change first to the Albanian Ura and then to the Slav Quprili.

It must have been snowing […] there […] Then he stopped writing, […] he thought of the distant ancestor called Gjon who on a winter's day several centuries before had built a bridge and at the same time edified his name. The patronymic bore within it, like a secret message, the destiny of the Quprilis for generation after generation. And so that the bridge might endure, a man was sacrificed in its building, walled up in its foundations. And although so much time had gone by since, the traces of his blood had come down to the present generation. So that the Quprilis might endure […]

The destiny of the Quprilis is symbolized in the bridge. They are identified in terms of their split identity: as Albanian, originally Christian, on the eastern fringe of Europe, the creators of the three-arched bridge symbolizing the land of Albania itself on the one hand, and as Ottoman, converted Muslims, at the centre of the Empire, having betrayed their ethnic origins on the other.⁸ The immured man symbolizes the repression of ethnic identity in this family who created a bridge to pass through central Albania and thereby opened up their land to the Empire—and the Empire to themselves.

After all that has happened, Mark-Alem reflects nostalgically on his desire to throw off the “Islamic half-shield” of Ottoman identity superimposed over the original language, religion and culture of the Albanians, and resume his ethnic identity, understood as his original, “native” identity after all these centuries.

Mark-Alem […] remembered how on the fateful night he had longed to throw off the protective mask, the Islamic half-shield of “Alem,” and adopt one of those ancient names which attracted danger and were marked by fate. As before he repeated to himself: Mark-Gjergj Ura, Mark-Gjorg Ura […] still holding the pen poised in his hand, as if uncertain what name to append to the ancient chronicle […]

(188-9)

But in the end, of course, he does not. We can only smile at the incongruity as this pampered only son remembers those “ancient names which attracted danger and were marked by fate” (189). Mark-Alem still toys with the idea of reclaiming his life and becoming a hero, but deep down he has known all along that he could never become another Kurt.⁹ It is hard to imagine him following his heart and turning his back on the Quprili traditions of power and prestige. The romantic nostalgia of his dreams is in direct proportion to the unlikelihood of his ever realizing them.

The novel ends with a powerful evocation of the coming of spring. This itself may be a parody of Kafka's springtime image at the end of The Transformation, where the Samsa family return to the world of everyday life after the crisis of Gregor's change and death has passed:

Something beyond the window was calling him insistently. […] The almond trees are in bloom, he thought. […] There, a few paces away, was life reviving, warmer clouds, storks, love—all the things he'd been pretending to ignore for fear of being wrested from the grasp of the Palace of Dreams.

Mark-Alem retains the Islamic “shield” of his double-barrelled name and suppresses the siren-call of his ethnic homeland, “the lahuta in his breast,” to become another colourless, faceless official of the Empire. He has remained in the service of the Sultan: fear, power and prestige have overridden ethnic identity and the desire for freedom which it expresses.

But despite these thoughts he didn't take his face away from the window. I'll order the sculptor right away to carve a branch of flowering almond on my tombstone, he thought. He wiped the mist off the window with his hand, but what he saw outside was still no clearer: everything was distorted and iridescent. Then he realized his eyes were full of tears.

(190)

His tears on the last page manifest the “Quprilian sadness,” the melancholy arising from repression of desire, the killing of this life-force explicitly associated in the novel with ethnic identity. In his vision of a tombstone of flowering almond we can see the vicarious romanticism of a successful young man who has never “lived,” and is now about to be consigned to a life of constriction and routine. Mark-Alem's nostalgia for a life of heroic action is safely circumscribed by the window of his Director's carriage. His life-choice has been made for him in the power-structures of the Sultan, his family and the Palace of Dreams.

Kadare's hero has a position of power at the centre of the Empire yet he remains a victim of structures beyond his control. This is perhaps the most devastating aspect of Kadare's satire: his hero, unlike Orwell's Winston Smith, is part of the innermost circle of the Empire. He holds a post of supreme importance, but like Kafka's heroes, the most damning images of rootless individuality and uncomprehending existence in modernity, he is completely alienated. This powerful bureaucrat and “man without qualities” is the instrument of repression of his own desires.

The final image of springtime is undercut by the associations with death and rebirth. Mark-Alem's life as an official of the Palace of Dreams has taken place in an environment of winter and spiritual death and he realizes that the wind of winter can return at any time:

He felt that if he was crouching there it was to protect himself, and that if ever, some late afternoon like this, he gave in to the call of life and left his refuge, the spell would be broken: the wind would turn against the Quprilis and the men would come for him as they'd come for Kurt, and take him, perhaps a little less unceremoniously, to the place from which there is no returning.

(190)

Sitting in his Director's carriage, Mark-Alem imagines one last time what he most desires: death, martyrdom and spiritual life in his ethnic Albanian homeland. Spring can only be captured forever in cold bronze and the blooming almond trees promise more in the relief of death than they do in the new life around him. Meanwhile, ironically, all Albania has fallen “prey to insomnia” (178): it is 1878 and the “National Awakening” is well under way as the Albanians translate their dreams of national autonomy into reality.

In Mark-Alem's imagination Albania represents escape from the grim world of the Palace of Dreams. This dream of ethnic liberation and self-fulfilment is captured, submitted to interrogation, killed before his eyes and held up as a trophy to the politics of dictatorial, centralized power. With the assassination of the rhapsodists we would expect Mark-Alem to be thoroughly disabused of this dream of ethnic self-identification. But, strangely, it lives on, resurfacing at the end as a desire for death and self-sacrifice and manifesting all of the negativity and morbidity of the Quprili epic. Like the epic, this dream survives the individual—even in presaging the death of the individual. In its appeal to an imagined community, based on the ethnic identification of family, tradition, culture and homeland, Mark-Alem's dream links him to something which is missing from his life-world: a sense of civil society and community, no matter how romantic in inspiration, morbid in expression, or impossible in reality. For Mark-Alem ethnic identity is imbued with the spirit of freedom. But that spirit is deformed into a dream of death, an expression of thanatos. Finally we are left with an image of the polarization of instrumentalized power and romanticised ethnicity. Mark-Alem's romantic nostalgia for ethnic identity has been deformed by the instrumental politics of power just as the first dreams of ethnies are deformed into nations, states and empires. The assimilated bureaucrat, Mark-Alem, has internalized the reality of imperial power alongside its opposite, the romantic dream of imagined community. Mark-Alem betrays himself by internalizing the polarized structure of control and romanticism. He is not an outsider like Winston Smith, whose opposition is smashed by the invasive and technologically advanced machinery of the Party. Dreams threaten the Empire. They are the expression of individualism and of anarchic desire. But they are also the key to complete control, the aim of all dictatorships. In Mark-Alem the Empire has come close to finding its ideal subject: one in whom the Gleichschaltung of dream and reality, of desire and control has been achieved.

Mark-Alem does not succumb to the pull of his Albanian origins to become a champion of ethnic identity and national separatism like his uncle Kurt. Nevertheless the struggle between ethnicity and empire is powerfully evoked in the novel as a contest imbibed by each generation from history, environment and family tradition and internalized as the desire for an identity drawing on a powerful repository of stories and music, myths and images and promising an identity which is more than the individual. The blood of that first sacrificial victim to the bridge, which was to enable the Quprilis to leave their mountainous homeland, reappears in the myth for each generation, a reminder of the origins and the sacrifice which they made in becoming Ottoman Albanians.¹⁰ Mark-Alem's Albania of the imagination is born of his family's history, memories and stories. It taps a deeper and wider sense of being, a timeless, “oceanic” collectivity, which is a measure of the shallowness and narrowness of his life-world. Its most powerful image in this work, even if tinged with irony, is that of the Albanian rhapsodists' “vibrant age-old lament,” sung in a voice

in which the throat of man and the throat of the mountains seemed […] to have attuned themselves to one another and merged […] until they joined in the lament of the stars. Words and voice alike might as easily have come from the mouth of the dead as of the living […] this hollow cage [the lahuta—PM] was the breast containing the soul of the nation to which he belonged.

(151)

Kadare represents ethnic identity as a category of human feeling with roots deep in the psyche of the individual and the group—whether the dynastic clan, the ethnic group or the nation.

CONCLUSION

Ethnicity was unacceptable as a category of social identity in the internationalist ideology of orthodox Marxism-Leninism. Yet ethnic identities survived communism and by the early 1980s had become a powerful destabilizing force throughout the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe.¹¹ Feelings of ethnic and national identity had not been supplanted by the unity of workers of the world, or even the brotherhood of nations. Ethnicity, implying a deeper and less tangible sense of belonging than merely participating in a communist nation-state, was making a come-back.

However ethnic identity was considered suspect among oppositional circles as well. For most Eastern European dissident intellectuals, with their roots in Enlightenment as well as Marxist cosmopolitanism, ethnicity began in political romanticism and ended in fascism. Hence it received little validation as a category of social analysis in socialism, least of all as a category of opposition to dictatorial regimes. In the literature of socialist Central and Eastern Europe the use of ethnicity as a positive identifying factor was prohibited. In the theory of socialist realism ethnic identity could be remembered, perhaps, as a relic of the bourgeois or fascist past, and nation-states were retained as a necessity in the transitional phase of real-existing socialism. But neither was relevant to the future of communism.

While Enver Hoxha in Albania differed from most of his counterparts in his national separatism, this was wedded to a version of Marxism-Leninism in which ethnic and cultural aspects of national identity were sacrificed to the ideology of modern socialist nation-building.¹² According to Arshi Pipa, Kadare was criticized by Dritëro Agolli, the President of the League of Albanian Writers and Artists for “subjectivist treatment of historical material and legends,” even to the point of an “excessive modernization and actualization” resulting in “mannerism.” This was at the 1982 Plenum, around the time of the banning of The Palace of Dreams. In his response, Kadare accepted criticism regarding “disproportion between actual and historical themes” in his works, but after paying “lip service to the communist practice of self-criticism,” he counterattacks, taking the lead from Hoxha's saying that “the times demand the enlargement of the thematic range […] in order that the great tableau of socialist realism be completed by writers and artists,” not through “schematism, but real life, not poverty, but richness, not narrowness, but breadth.”¹³ It seems clear in this context that the ethnic dimension of The Palace of Dreams represents exactly the type of “mannerism” that Kadare was being accused of and which he defended himself against while still in the country.

Kadare's exploration of ethnic consciousness and the politics of empire reveals ethnicity to be a powerful force of individual and group identity, a part of the individual and social imaginary capable of being instrumentalized and romanticized within the context of political power-structures. Ethnicity is given its place as one of the central categories of group-identity, of Elias's “Wir-Gefühl” or Castoriadis's “social imaginary.”

By using the dream as the image of the interface between the personal and the political, Kadare creates a satiric metaphor for the aim of totalitarian societies to control individual freedom. While his literary forebears are Orwell and Kafka, and his fictional institution of the Palace of Dreams owes its conception to the Ministry of Truth and the Castle, Kadare's surreal image of dictatorial control is far from derivative. In linking contemporary Eastern European literature with the tradition of the European political novel, Kadare deepens the understanding of the mechanisms of psychological intimidation of 1984, and introduces the theme of ethnic identity into the existential novel after Kafka. In the context of the Eastern European novel, the stylistic link with Kafka makes a politically loaded statement of creative-aesthetic association, just as the echoes of Orwell imply an identification with the Western European anti-Stalinist political novel. Where Western European political writers such as Orwell revealed the oppositions between individual desire and dictatorship, Kadare goes beyond this in identifying ethnic identity on the individual as well as the group level as the primary threat to dictatorships at the end of the twentieth century. Using the Albanian example, he explores the “Balkan syndrome” of imperial domination in which minority ethnic identity is repressed and thereby perpetuated. At the same time he provides a critical framework for this dream of liberation of “the captive mind.” For while ethnicity can express itself as a liberating component of identity, in the figures of Kurt and the Albanian rhapsodists it turns into a fundamentalist version of utopia. This took one form, perhaps, in the national isolationism of Enver Hoxha, other forms perhaps, in any number of Balkan ethnic separatisms.

Notes

1. I would like to record my thanks to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, whose support enabled me to undertake the research for this article.

2. Ismail Kadare, The Palace of Dreams, translated from the French of Jusuf Vrioni by Barbara Bray (London: Collins/Harvill, 1993); Ismail Kadaré, Le palais des rêves, roman traduit de l'albanais par Jusuf Vrioni (Paris: Fayard, 1990). Page numbers in brackets following quotations are to the English edition unless otherwise noted.

3. Kadare's Quprilis are based on the Albanian Köprülü dynasty, which as noted in the text is listed in successive editions of the Larousse encyclopaedia: “Koeprulu, famille d'origine albanaise, dont cinq membres furent, de 1656 à 1710, vizirs de l'Empire ottoman. Les plus connus sont: Mohammed Koeprulu, né a Koepri en 1596, mort à Adrianople en 1661. Pétit-fils d'un Albanais établi en Anatolie, il entra comme marmiton au sérail, et parvint au poste de grand écuyer du vizir Kara-Moustafa, qui le fit nommer gouverneur de Damas. La sultane validé le chargea, en 1656, de gouverner l'empire avec une autorité sans contrôle pendant la minorité de Mohammed IV. Koeprulu releva la situation militaire et pécuniaire de l'empire, conquit Ténédos et Lemnos (1657) et réprima la révolte de Syrie et de l'Egypte (1659).—Fazil-Ahmed Koeprulu Oglou, fils et successeur du précédent, né en 1633, mort à Adrianople en 1691. Il ne remporta que des succès dans les guerres de Hongrie, mais il fut battu à Saint-Gothard par Montecucolli (1664) et à Choczim par Jean Sobieski (1673). Cependant il conquit le Crète (1669) et Kemenez (1672), il recula les frontières de l'empire ottoman, dan lequel il rétablit l'ordre et la tranquillité. Il favorisa les savants et fonda une riche bibliothèque qui s'est conservée jusqu'à nos jours.—Mustapha Koeprulu, frère du précedent, surnommé le Vertueux, mort à Stankomen en 1691. Le sultan Soleïman III le nomma grand vizir après la déposition de Mahomet IV (1689). Il gouverna sagement l'empire et fit avec succès une campagne en Hongrie, reconquit Belgrade (1690), mais fut tué dans une bataille contre les Impériaux.—Amoudja-Zadèh-Hussein Koeprulu, cousin du précédent, mort en 1702. Il fut d'abord gouverneur de Belgrade, et Mustapha II le nomma grand vizir en 1697. Ce fut lui qui négocia la paix de Karlowitz (1699) et il chercha à relever le niveau moral de l'empire en fondant des écoles et en faisant disparaïtre les barrières qui séparaient les chrétiens des musulmans; mais, violemment combattu dans ses projects par le mufti il se démit de sa charge, et mourut peu après.—Noman Koeprulu, grand vizir de l'empire ottoman, fils de Mustapha, mort à Négrepont en 1710. Le sultan Ahmed III lui confia le grand vizirat en 1710; mais, il fut destitué au bout de deux mois.” Larousse du XXe Siècle en 6 Volumes (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1931) 4: 257. Later editions of the Larousse Encyclopaedic Dictionary include shortened versions of the article. See also Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans. Vol. 1: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries; Vol. 2 Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1: 81; Maximilian Lambertz, Die Volksepik der Albaner (Leipzig: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl Marx Universität, 1954-55), Vol. 4, 243-89 and 439-70, especially 270; Stavro Skendi, The Albanian National Awakening, 1878-1912 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 21.

4. For a full analysis, interpretation and discussion of the Albanian and Bosniak versions of the epic, see my article, “Between Albanian Identity and Imperial Politics: Ismail Kadare's The Palace of Dreams,” Modern Language Review 97 (2002): 1-15.

5. The name Albania is believed to derive from the Albanoi, an Illyrian tribe living in central Albania from the second century BC. Since the sixteenth century, however, Albanians themselves have called their language Shqipe, their country Shqipëria and themselves Shqiptar. It was earlier believed that these names derived from the word shqipe meaning “eagle,” “Albania” thus translating as “land of the eagle.” More recent research has indicated that the name derives from the word shqiptoj, meaning “to speak intelligibly” [see William B. Bland, Compiler, Albania: World Bibliographical Series, vol. 94 (Oxford: Clio Press, 1988), xvii]. The text here clearly refers to the Albanian self-identification as “sons of eagles” in their mountainous homeland.

6. The name, Gjergj or Djerz in particular occurs in Albanian and Bosnian epic, respectively: “The famous hero, Gerz-Iljas, is also mentioned in the long account … of the fighting in the Bosnian borderland in the years 1479 to 1480.” See H. T. Norris, Islam in the Balkans: Religion and Society between Europe and the Arab World (London: Hurst & Company, 1993), 159; cf. also Lambertz, Die Volksepik der Albaner.

7. This phrase, deriving from Robert Musil's novel (1930-1943), is used as a generic term for the passive and instrumentalized protagonists of twentieth-century Central and Eastern European fiction.

8. Kadare uses the image of the bridge with three arches as a symbol of Albania, in particular in his historical novel of 1978, The Three-Arched Bridge. Each arch stands for a long period of the country's foreign occupation: Roman, Byzantine, Turkish.

9. “Mark-Alem might have thought of imitating him, but he knew he was incapable of it” (50).

10. This image of the bridge has archetypal significance in the pre-Slavic Greek and “Illyrian” folklore of the Balkan peninsula. See Georgios A. Megas, Die Ballade von der Arta-Brücke: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies. Megas, 1976), and Ardian Klosi, Mythologie am Werk: Kazantzakis, Andrić, Kadare (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1991).

11. Recent research has focused on the role of ethnic politics in the disintegration of the Soviet Union. See Graham Smith, ed., The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union (London: Longman, 1990); Victor Zaslavsky, “Nationalism and Democratic Transition in Postcommunist Societies,” Daedalus 121(2) (1992): 97-122; Nadia Diuk and Adrian Karatnycky, New Nations Rising: The Fall of the Soviets and the Challenge of Independence (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1993); Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Ben Fowkes, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: A Study in the Rise and Triumph of Nationalism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997).

12. Cf. Robert Elsie, “Evolution and Revolution in Modern Albanian Literature,” World Literature Today 65(2) (1991): 256-63, especially 258: “The persecution of intellectuals … and the break with virtually all cultural traditions created a literary and cultural vacuum in Albania that lasted until the sixties, the results of which can still be felt today.”

13. Quoted from Arshi Pipa, “Subversion vs. Conformism: The Kadare Phenomenon,” Telos 71 (1987/88): 47-77, especially 74.

Works Cited

Haroche, Charles, “Gespräch mit Ismail Kadare,” Sinn und Form 42 (1990): 706-14.

Vickers, Miranda and Pettifer, James, Albania: From Anarchy to a Balkan Identity (London: Hurst & Company, 1997).