Narrative Conceptualizing of Revisionism: So Hot Was the Cannon

Abstract

So Hot Was the Cannon by Vladimir Kecmanović received a lot of attention immediately after publication. Since it thematizes the siege of Sarajevo, along with the main character, a boy – a mute witness and narrator, upon a superficial reading of the text, it may appear as a novel that opens up space for confronting the past. A closer reading, along with unraveling the narrative strategies, reveals a revisionist picture of the siege of Sarajevo from 1992-1996. Thus, the characters are flat, without contradictions, often reduced to a collective identity. The plot, although some of the critics claimed the opposite, is sharply polarized among different collective ethnically distributed actants in the novel, and the whole story in general functions as a specific structural chiasm regarding aggressor – victim relation. The development of the plot is entirely subordinated to the creation of this effect, just like the distribution of dialogue, i.e. the speech of the characters. This paper aims to investigate some of the narrative strategies that contribute to this effect while highlighting the ideologically motivated stereotypes that form the basis of the narrative and the production of inverse images of the siege of Sarajevo.