'We need a memory of everything'

Slovenian writer Drago Jancar tells Arminta Wallace how James Joyce ended up in the title story of his latest collection

For an Irish reader it comes as quite a surprise to find, in a short story by a contemporary Slovenian writer, a character by the name of James Joyce. It shouldn't, of course. Glance at a map of Europe, and you'll see that on its looping journey from the mountains to the Adriatic Sea, the Slovenian border steers just to the east of the city of Trieste, where Joyce lived in self-imposed exile. It would, on reflection, be rather odd if the creator of Ulysses were not an object of interest to his nearest neighbours in central Europe.

But as Drago Jancar explains, the title story of his collection Joyce's Pupil, which is published in Ireland by Brandon Press on April 25th just before his appearance at Cúirt, was not inspired by the work of Joyce directly, but by a single sentence in Richard Ellmann's magisterial biography of the writer.

"I found one sentence with a Slovenian name - Furlan," he explains. "Boris Furlan. And somewhere in my subconscious I knew about a particular Boris Furlan who was standing in front of a court after the second World War, on trial as an enemy of a socialistic Yugoslavia."

Jancar did some research, and discovered that it was indeed the same Boris Furlan who had taken English lessons from Joyce in 1914.

"I felt it was an irony of history," he says, "that somebody who was very deeply involved with language - this great stylist whose work I so admired - should cause the tragic story of somebody else, who was his pupil. So I wrote the story. I invented some things; especially atmosphere, of course."

If the 12 stories which make up Joyce's Pupil are anything to go by, atmosphere is something of a Jancar specialty. Though they range across a wide variety of times and places, from a business trip to Manhattan to a 15th-century pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, the pieces share a mood of brooding menace. Unnamed armies commit stealthy acts of slaughter. A young doctor becomes obsessed with Albert Einstein's eyes. Between these covers life is a bleak business, saturated in death. But for all its glittering brutality, it is not a depressing book - its author's keenly sharpened sense of humour sees to that.

It is interesting, however, that when the book appeared in Jancar's native Slovenia the title story was not Joyce's Pupil but the piece which now appears as the closing one, The Look of an Angel. Does this mean that Irish readers, with our very different understanding of history and our very different priorities, will interpret the stories in a completely different way from readers in Slovenia?

"Probably," says Jancar. "I hope so. Literature must be open to different ways of reading. We are probably not reading James Joyce the very same way as you do. We cannot read Ulysses, for instance, against this great background of Irish history - but still we can read it as a very powerful piece of literature.

"It's not necessary to know Slovenian history, because at the centre of my writing the focus is always on the individual story - the fate of one individual towards another or towards society, a society full of oppressive ideas. That's enough. I believe that literature originates from national roots; but its message, its structure, the whole system is universal."

The use of Joyce as a character is not Jancar's only link with Ireland. This volume has already been translated into Irish: and in 1974, when he was working as a journalist on a Slovenian newspaper, he planned to spend some time here, covering events in the North.

History, however, intervened. "The secret police arrested me," he says. "I was sent to prison." His "crime" was that he brought into the country - and shared with his friends - a book of which the authorities disapproved.

"It's always the problem of Slovenian history," says Jancar. "It was about the Communists slaughtering people. In Slovenia and in all Yugoslavia there was complete silence about all events after the war. It was a taboo topic, you know? Nobody was talking about this. Slovenian political emigres in Austria had published the book, and when I read it I was shocked, because for the first time I learned about these events. I gave the book to my literary friends - journalists and so on. And I was suddenly in trouble.

"Also," he adds, "I was engaged in the student movement in the years 1968 to 1971 in Slovenia. So I had already a bad record with security police. So . . . it happened. It's not such a big event in my life. I was in prison for a short time, then I was amnestied."

The experience, however, helped Jancar to make up his mind to be a writer. "This was the time when I definitely decided for literature," he says. "Because it was the irony of history, or fate, that when I was imprisoned I was in the same jail where my father had been. Not in the same cell, but the same courtyard and the same corridors. He was jailed by the Gestapo in 1944; and I was imprisoned by the Communists in 1974."

Small wonder, then that this bittersweet leitmotif on the theme of the irony of history runs though Jancar's work. "I would say it is a theme, yes," he says. "The imprisonment left in me - not a wound, exactly. I mean, I didn't have any feeling of revenge or 'la vendetta' or anything like that. I was very young, so I didn't feel this way - but I started to think about history and the individual in a different way."

His thinking changed again after he lived in the US for a year. "In 1985 I was invited to be a writer-in-residence - and it was a very comfortable year."

He divided his time between New Orleans and New York, and wrote a novel, which has been translated into English as Mocking Desire, on the strength of his experiences. The book, he explains, is a study in contrasts. "It was a confrontation between the central European melancholic and tragic experience of life and history, and American optimism, and the pleasure to be alive and so on."

Did he enjoy his time in the land of the free? "Yes," he says. "But I was thinking all the time - why are we Europeans so suicidal? Why do we hate each other? Is this a problem of our Catholicism, or what the hell is it with this central Europe idea? Not only Slovenia, but all of us, you know? Because Americans are so much more open." And also, he adds, after a fraction of a second's pause, "much more stupid".

Meanwhile, Slovenia has become a member of the EU, and social change has been rapid. "Of course, people live a little better," says Jancar. "But now, 15 years later, there is a new generation already which is accepting this way of life as something normal. They are accepting the values of the new Europe - the time we lived in is almost forgotten. Which is not completely good, because we need a memory of everything that happened. Bad and good."

Drago Jancar will read at the Cúirt Festival in Galway on Apr 28 and in Dublin on May 5 at the Irish Writers' Centre, Parnell Square