The Minotaur and the Self

Construction of a Flexible Bulgarian-ness through Disability in Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow

The Minotaur in Georgi Gospodinov’s физика на тъгата, translated as The Physics of Sorrow (2011, translated 2015), embodies the sadness and suffering of the modernist periods of ideological conflict over Bulgarian national identity. The history of classical figures in Bulgarian narratives often involved Orpheus as a propagandist national icon and a totem of the Western tradition. Instead, Gospodinov’s Minotaur and boy whose memoir leads him to identify more with the mythic ‘freak’ than the human heroes subverts the modernist search for a national identity dating to the World Wars period and the Socialist Era. As a result, the novel reconciles Bulgaria’s ‘cultural in-betweenness’ with the postmodern realities of contemporary Bulgaria. The Physics of Sorrow establishes the postmodern subject–position as the breakdown of national identities of the past, in order to encompass them all in a Bulgarian identity that is true to its social and cultural history.

            In order to introduce postmodern ideas into the novel, Gospodinov employs disability representations throughout the narrator’s life that inscribe him in postmodern logic. Disabilities’ validity as a postmodern signifier comes from Lennard J. Davis’ theoretical postulate of dismodernism, where disability serves as the ‘ideal postmodern subject position’ as a result of its ability to impact the experiences of every human regardless of other identity markers.^[1] Because of this theory’s root in American culture, it is important first to contextualise the form and content of the novel as a distinctly Bulgarian product. First, this study investigates the formal characteristics which indicate Gospodinov’s emulation of the postmodern Bulgarian memoir form and then proceeds to this form’s implications in the discourse around national identity. At that point, classical Greco–Roman mythical figures in Bulgarian literary culture will emerge as nationalistic iconography and as part of the cultural conflict between Western and Eastern traditions, represented by Bulgarian folklore. Gospodinov’s desire to create a work of world literature through this novel necessitates a position in the cultural conflict, as Gospodinov’s use of the Minotaur as a classical Greek figure simultaneously invokes this cultural conflict and subverts its conventions by identifying with the Bulgarian Other as defined in contrast to the nationalistic ideals. Such otherness can be directly connected to disability in Bulgarian society and culture, and as a result, the Minotaur and disability representations in The Physics of Sorrow acknowledge a specifically Bulgarian conflict over national identity as a confirmation that such rigid identities must cede to the elastic and pluralistic postmodern subject–position.

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^[1] Lennard J. Davis, ‘The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism: On Disability as an Unstable Category,’ in The Disability Studies Reader, 2^nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 232.