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Pleasure and Pain: Corporeality in Ivan Mažuranić’s Smail-aga Čengić’s Death

The main aim of this essay is to connect the role of bodily practices with collective memory, collective myths and trauma, as well as with the post-revolutionary ideas in Ivan Mažuranić’s eponymous epic poem Smail-aga Čengić’s Death (Smrt Smail-age Čengića, 1846). This canonical text marked not only the Croatian 19th century literature and culture, but also redefined various long-lasting national metaphors such as Antemurale Christianitatis (Bulwark of Christianity) that labeled a frontier defense of Christian Europe from the Ottoman Empire. If we analyze Mažuranić’s poem in the framework of the post-revolutionary ideological practices which presume the idea of political freedom as universal right and the final purpose of every society and each governmental system, various direct or indirect references to the French Revolution will be found in the text, and most notably the geopolitical importance of the peripheral “small” nations in the European cultural and ideological landscape. As an allegory, Smail-aga Čengić’s Death reverberates the modernist idea that historical progress inevitably throws down any despotism and shows that fuit tyrannos signifies a diametrical reposition in the roles of a sovereign as a figure who stands above the law. To that end Aga changes his position: from a sovereign he becomes homo sacer (according to G. Agamben), the one who remains outside the law/society/community. In Mažuranić’s poem, tormented, colossal body of the voiceless nation is transformed into a strong agent of history, and the former sovereign, as a torturer – a colossal voice with no body (E. Scarry) – becomes “a marvelous marvel, ” merely a puppet of history, an amusing thing.

body, pain, corporeality, memory, Ivan Mažuranić

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