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Damn courtyard

The damn courtyard is a novel by Serbian writer and Nobel laureate Ivo Andric from 1954. The novel belongs to the later period of Andric's literary creation.

Damn courtyard
Prokleta Avlija
Born	9. октобар 1892.
Died	13. март 1975. (82 год.)
Partner	Milica Babic - Jovanovic
Awards	Nobel Prize for Literature 1961
Website	https://www.ivoandric.org.rs/english/worksen/novels/170-the-damned-yard

Summary

In Andric's novel, The Damn Courtyard is the name of the famous Constantinople dungeon, where Fr. Petar from Bosnia came for unjustified reasons when they sent him to Istanbul to do some monastery work. It happened that the Turkish authorities caught a letter addressed to the Austrian internment in Constantinople, in which the persecution of the faithful by the Turkish authorities was described and suspicion fell on Fr. Peter. He was arrested and imprisoned in the pre-trial prison - "Damn Courtyard", where he remained for two months until he was sent on.

In "Damn Courtyard", Fra-Petar meets several people, who in this novel turn into a gallery of interesting characters. There is the manager of the "Cursed Courtyard" of Latifaga called Karadjoz, a prisoner Chaim, a Jew from Smyrna, and then the central character from this novel, a prisoner Camil-effendi, a rich young Turk from Smyrna. Fra-Petar learns from Haim, a young man's fellow citizen, that he was imprisoned on suspicion that his study of consciousness was aimed at rebellious intrigue against the sultan's court, which was completely untrue. Young Camil, the son of a rich Turk and a Greek woman, devoted himself from science to a solitary and ascetic way of life from an early age, which was especially emphasized by an unhappy and unrequited love. Namely, Camil fell in love with the daughter of a young Greek merchant, but for nationalist-religious reasons, he did not want to give her to a Turk for a wife, but forcibly married her to a Greek outside Smyrna. After that event, Camil completely closed himself in and became a kind of individual. He surrounds himself with books and throws himself into science, showing a special interest in the consciousness of the Turkish Empire, of which he is particularly interested in a certain period - the time of Bayezid II and Jam-Sultan, his brother, whom Bayezid defeated twice in the battle for the throne. Then Jam sought refuge on the island of Rhodes, where Christian knights ruled. Since then, the odyssey of Cem begins, who, as a prisoner, passes from the hands of various European rulers, and even the Pope himself, and they all use him as a trump card against the Turkish Empire, that is. they threaten Bayazit that he will release him if he does not satisfy their various demands. Camila is suspected of studying precisely that historical period because it has similarities with the current situation at the court, where the sultan also has a rival brother, whom he declared insane and holds captive. Jamil was sent to the "Cursed Court", where he met Fr. Peter and told him about the life of Jam-Sultan, claiming that his life was identical with Jamil's and that their destinies were the same. After a while, they took him to a special prison, and one night during the interrogation, a fight broke out between him and the police. It is not known whether the camels are taken out - alive or dead. Fra-Peter never saw him again.

Storytelling in the damn courtyard

The composition of the novel The Damn Courtier is solid, but also complex. Firm because the stories, of which there are more, stick close together, and complex because of their ring structure. The ring composition merges several narrators and several points of view into one coherent whole. Out of a desire to understand a comprehensive, ‘omniscient’ story, more complementary narrators are often introduced, and in this connection more ‘sources of truth’ in an effort to create the illusion that the narrator is not omniscient but a story.

Multiple narrators

An objective narrator

Let's say that the frame of the entire table is the novel itself, the objective narrator is in its prologue and epilogue. His speech is purely literary and in the 3rd person. From his point of view, we were given a description of the cemetery at the beginning of Winter, the snow fell all the way to the front door and the epilogue Next! Write: one steel saw, small German. One! forms the backbone of the novel and is outside the world of the Damn Courtyard.

Fra - Rastislav

Fra - Rastislav is a character who is very skilfully 'drawn' into the palette of other characters. He is the mediator between the narrator and Fr. Peter, and the narrator uses him as a silent witness to Fr. Peter's stories. Fra-Rastislav is the link between the world shown in Yard and the real world in which Fra-Petar talked about yard and died. Using the retrospective technique, he shows us the events in the Courtyard. The next narrator is introduced to us by Fra - Rastislav with the sentence It is best to let a person speak freely.

Fra Peter

Fr. Peter's story is basic in the novel, through his story to Fr. Rastislav we learn both about him and about the inhabitants of the Courtyard. He builds the story according to the order in which he notices or learns certain elements. Neither guilty nor guilty, he fell in love with the dungeons, in such a situation he begins to live spiritually and to save himself spiritually through friendship with Jamil, who tells him his story about the Jam-Sultan. Fra-Petar does not tell 'for the sake of the story' but because he feels the need to leave Fra-Rastislav a story about the Damn Courtyard and the suffering of young Camil.

Haim

The next narrator who makes up one of the links of the ring composition is Haim. Like the other characters in the Courtyard, he is portrayed from the point of view of Fr. Peter. How much he liked to speak can be found in the statement of Fr. Peter. This is his eloquence and it brought him here. His narration is thorough, convincing, supported by facts and even details. His function as a narrator is to provide information about Camil and the causes of that tragedy in order to create a more complete idea of ​​the Cursed Court, its purpose, and meaninglessness in the reader's mind.

Camil's destiny is at the heart of the story, but the story has a broader artistic meaning than ordinary individual destiny: it elevates the individual to the level of the general, connects the past and the present, the influence of totalitarian society on personality identity, dungeon-guilt, and innocence. Through the story of the man who lives with the books and the story of the historical conflict between Bayezid and Jem, he immerses himself in the ancient story of the 'enemy brothers' that has lasted since he was holy and eternally. Camil, story No introduction to visible connections, no timeline.

For Andric, the story is a kind of content of his narration. The damn courtyard is a story about the stories of different people, Fra-Petar gets closer to the unfortunate Camil precisely through his story. From the realm of imagination into which Camil's story took him, Fra-Petra and everything on earth begin to look different. For him, the Cursed Court transforms in a strange way into a hint of freedom and infinity. It was as if the story had just opened his eyes to the beauty of the Istanbul dawn, when the sky turned red and landed. Because behind every story there is a sound halo that floats in the air even when the spoken word is extinguished.

The presence of the tradition of oral storytelling can be felt in the Cursed Courtyard, in which Andric found his stylistic model that will be the most vivid. History is the material of collective memory. But only what is close to the human imagination and from which it can create a legend is remembered it. The legend is created only when the event is over, and the folk narrator decorates and builds it with his 'fantasy stories' in order to remember them longer. Andric found his stylistic and narrative models in this feature. He did not separate himself individually from inherited and widespread cultural forms but listened to the legends and the way of narration in them. In the bloody history, the prison situation, again, a legend is what designs it and helps a person to survive. With the legend, Andric shapes such a fateful experience common to many generations.

In all the stories in the Damn Courtyard, the third person predominates, which is only occasionally interrupted by the introduction of the first person, that is. by directly stating what some of the narrators are saying. Dzadzic notes that there is no dialogue in the Cursed Court. Fra-Petar cannot and does not want to have a dialogue. He accepts other people's monologues and silently comments on them. He seeks everywhere, finds and sees the beginning and consequences of reckless speech, and knows the price at which such speech is paid. He narrates events, but only when they are far behind him when he can express them in the grammatical tense of the past.

Speaking of points of view, Andric is characterized by that distant or high point from which he calmly describes the reality of the people of one time. From that point, he starts narrating, approaching certain events and objects, but he never forgets his 'high point', as his basic perspective as a chronicler. A classic example in this regard is the beginning of the Damn Courtyard. He first describes the appearance of the cemetery, gradually narrowing his view of the cell. The description is colored by the lyrical experience of the whiteness of the outside world, mixed with the drowsy shadow that reigns in the cell, and the silence goes well with the quiet noise of his numerous clocks that are still working, while some, unrolled, have already stopped.

Every time an objective narrator uses some speech element that belongs to the characters in the work when he moves to their point of view, he puts that speech in quotation marks. However, sometimes that perspective distance is abolished. When we are inside the central story, in the basic imaginative-literary world, which is the world of the Courtyard, the perspective distance between the speech of the objective narrator and the speech of the characters decreases, almost abolished in favor of the objective narrator, and before and after the story establishes. Thus, we could say without any restrictions: on the frames of the Damn Courtyard, the characters speak Ijekavian and with local-dialectal elements, and in its basic text, both of these linguistic moments are abolished for all characters. The simplicity of Andric's narration is one of the crucial reasons for the popularity of his work.