LIMINAL SPACE OF MEMORY IN DŽEVAD KARAHASAN’S NOVEL NOĆNO VIJEĆE (NIGHT COUNCIL)

Abstract

This paper analyzes the novel Noćno vijeće (Night Council) by the Bosnian Herzegovinian author Dževad Karahasan through the concept of the liminal space of memory, conceived as a theoretical model in which memory does not appear as a stable archive of the past, but rather as a dynamic, heterogeneous, and epistemologically unstable space situated between historical experience, metaphysical reflection, and narrative construction. Particular focus is placed on the manner Karahasan’s text produces memory as a space located in the basement of the house, where temporality, voices, and ontological layers of reality interwine. The paper approaches memory not as a fixed archive of the past, but as a dynamic and fragmented process shaped through spatial, temporal, and symbolic dislocations. Special attention is devoted to the ways in which Karahasan constructs a heterotopic and palimpsestic space in which different historical layers coexist simultaneously. The paper argues that the novel establishes liminality not only as a thematic motif, but also as a structural principle organizing narrative form and temporality. Through fragmented narration, disrupted chronology, and philosophical reflection, Night Council produces a space in which the boundaries between reality and imagination, dream and wakefulness, presence and absence remain continuously unstable. The paper further explores the metaphysical dimension of the novel through the concept of barzakh, interpreted as an intermediate realm that enables memory to function as a threshold between the visible and invisible worlds. Within this framework, liminality emerges as a transitional space, while figures are shaped as fragmented and constantly shifting phenomena. Drawing upon theories of liminality, trauma, and cultural memory, the article demonstrates how Karahasan’s prose transforms the act of remembering into a complex literary and philosophical experience. The structure of the novel reveals the structure of the octagon identical to the one located in the basement of the house of the phronimos Simon Mihailović, in which imprisoned souls are confined. The spectrogenic process, in which the past is neither fully present nor definitively absent, demands interpretation. The phronimos does not regenerate the mythical; rather, he acts within a fractured world of meaning, assuming responsibility for the traces of the past and creating meanings between the historical and the spectral. The paper demonstrates that Night Council articulates memory as a liminal structure through which historical consciousness, metaphysical manifestation, and narrative imagination become inseparable within the textual fabric of the novel.