The Rhetoric of Space: Ljubljana as a National Capital

Abstract

A city can be read as a “projection of cultural values and beliefs” (Mullaney) maintained by marking its space in forms of visual artifacts, ceremonies, and rituals. This article addresses how (a national) literature transforms the urban space of a national capital into a “text” of a (national) community. This question also highlights the role of the interpreter that reads these textual/spatial signs; that is, inscriptions in urban space (such as names of streets and squares, monuments and statues, material traces of literary-referential ceremonies and rituals, etc.). Examining these two questions, the article refers to Charles Sanders Peirce’s “semantic” trichotomy that, with respect to the relation between the sign and its object, differentiates three kinds of signs (icon, index, and symbol). This trichotomy serves to emphasize Steven Mullaney’s new-historicist reading of urban public places as “sites of potential meaning”; that is, rhetorical topoi that are (also) capable of very different “antithetical or ambivalent significance”. Therefore, their semiosis depends on the interpreter, who more or less shares his or her collective memory with the cultural community that writes inscriptions in the urban space it inhabits. However, in case of the literary cultures of central, eastern, and southeast Europe, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this new-historicist contribution to the spatial turn in literary studies narrowed its focus above all to those inscriptions that refer to the transnational ideological repertory of “separatistic nationalism” (Leerssen), in which the privileged role acts a national literature. In these cases, literature contributes literary-cultural suggestions (understood in a collective memory) as well as its rhetorical principles of inscribing and re-employing these suggestions in culturally mapping the space of a national capital. The article explains Foucault’s concept of (national-ideological) power that performatively re-presented itself in the case of Ljubljana in 1918 by referring to Ruda Jurčec’s literary report on the funeral ceremony organized in honor of Ivan Cankar, who was conceived of as the greatest Slovenian writer. According to this report, the funeral ceremony used theater-like performance links to transform the selected public places into a network of national rhetorical topoi. Although they may suggest different, ambivalent, or even contradictory meanings, in case of the capitals of the future nation states, their predominant interpretation seems to derive from the national collective memory supported by national literature. Moreover, in the Slovenian case it seems that inscriptions/interpretations of national literature in the capital’s space maintained the status of the most historically resistant rhetorical topoi even in periods when national ideology split itself into various and complex mixes with the rival universalist political ideologies of the twentieth century.