According to an old Hebrew myth, before a child is born an angel touches him or her just above the upper lip, thus symbolically sealing the child’s mouth. After this, the mouth of the future new-born child cannot speak about the secrets of otherworldly life, but at the same time the angel leaves behind the only trace of the otherworldly bliss the child can never feel again – the groove above the upper lip that every person has after being touched thus.Reference Hillman¹ It is not necessary to be a connoisseur of Kabbalah literature in order to feel the symbolic power of this Hebrew legend that successfully breaks through the intermingled voices of cultures and centuries, establishing a bridge between Plato’s doctrine of the soul’s oblivion and contemporary discoveries of archetypal psychology and anthropology.

Sometimes it appears to us that peoples who were our predecessors were more finely attuned to the beauty of life than we are, irrespective of the insignificance of the occasion when the said beauty is discovered. They were capable of seeing in the tiny groove that everyone has above his or her lip the imprint of an angel’s finger, a pledge to mankind gathered around a place of which it is perhaps objectionable to speak in scientific circles today. This unease testifies not only to the necessary measuredness of the academic community, which has a bad enough reputation as it is, but also to a compromise that we tend to make speaking of cultural exchange and dialogue. Even though the tactility of dialogue has been the subject of numerous linguistic and culturological investigations, what we often forget in theoretical discourse is precisely human contact. While abstracting and sublimating our own experiences, we lose sight of one another, of humanity, in its fundamental sense of belonging to the community of human beings.

The philtrum, that tiny groove just above the upper lip, challenges culturological boundaries in an unexpected way. Тhis tiniest of grooves, according to Hebrew myth, is capable of symbolically representing the idea of man’s destiny, or, as the contemporary psychologist James Hillman put it in his interpretation of the myth, the image or paradigm of human calling. Hillman’s idea that man is called into this world to fulfil a certain destiny, whose call he must recognize if he wants to live a full life, also originates from the era of antiquity. Plato, as Hillman reminds us, uses the term paradigm in order to describe the pattern of destiny that souls choose before descending onto the earth (Ref. Reference Hillman1, pp. 45–46). After forgetting godly secrets, man’s life in this world is nothing but a continuous search for a lost paradigm – a paradigm, we would add, which, judging by all appearances, we have actually never had, but towards which everything draws us irresistibly. An open quest for a paradigm, in fact, may be the best solution of all, for choosing one, as we know only too well, comes at a price: however much it enriches us, it equally often damages us, like the oblivion which, in everyday secular life, has claimed the mythical meaning of a tiny mark above man’s upper lip.

It would appear that the lovely but forgotten fate of the philtrum has been suffered by the great literary ideas of the twentieth century, such as those about the literarity or the cognitive power of works of literature. But the real topic of our paper is the relinquishing to oblivion of the principle that combines both those poles of the influence of a work of literature and raises the issue of dialogue with the Other in a dramatic fashion. What is at work here is an illusion embodied by many great heroes of world literature, an illusion that has also Serbian writers. What we are referring to is the ideal of spiritual chivalry that is attained along with all the material shortcomings and chaos of life’s circumstances. The latter indeed only make the former more visible and adds to it a layer of ironic and sentimental melancholy, of Don Quixotean failure and being misunderstood. All this finds a firm footing in Kierkegaard’s visions of chivalry in his Fear and Trembling.Reference Kierkegaard² We could call the bearers of this ideal ‘the last knights’, who, even though they are always the last ones, have been appearing for centuries on the stage of literature, from the unforgettable hero of Cervantes to Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, from the ‘triumphs’ to no avail lived by the characters of Joyce, Thomas Mann, or Bulgakov, to the unworldly protagonists of the works of Serbian writers Miloš Crnjanski, Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš or Meša Selimović.Reference Vraneš³ The durability of this great margin, which, however, never wishes to occupy the position of the centre, teaches us something about the nature of cultural cultivation and humanity, which shies away from power and would have to come to love man’s foibles and failures. This is no moral sentimentalism or a compromising acceptance of the entirety of man’s being, but awareness of the fact that our weakness is perhaps the only true virtue that we have.

Perhaps what we would like to say can best be demonstrated precisely by using the example of a Serbian writer of Muslim faith who is undeservedly unknown to the community of readers beyond his country of birth. Instead of resorting to a classical comparatist reading, perhaps it would be better to interpret but one syntagm from Meša Selimović’s work The Fortress,Reference Selimović⁴ which, as opposed to his highly acclaimed novel Death and the Dervish,Reference Selimović⁵ dealing with the coming into being and growth of hate, and with a defeat of the human spirit, is a novel about relinquishing power and a triumph of love.Reference Selimović⁶

Despite the danger of resorting to sujets that are clichéd and worn out by current usage, it would appear to us that, in an idealistic vision of love between two young people living in a small Bosnian town several centuries ago, a Muslim poet by the name of Ahmet Šabo and his Orthodox wife depicted in Selimović’s The Fortress, we can find a paradigm, a noble bequeathal for cultures that develop and come into contact increasingly often. The relationship between two faiths is entirely overshadowed by the story of humanity joined in love, which the novel’s protagonist and narrator characterizes in an unexpected way.

The love between Tijana and Ahmet, in the words of the narrator, Šabo himself, is a ‘narrow-minded’ kind of love (Ref. Reference Selimović4, p. 163).Reference Selimović⁷ The remark about narrow-minded kind of love is one of the most felicitously phrased figures of Selimović’s novel, which opens up the possibility of love, modesty and self-understanding within the framework of a cultural dialogue. This noble narrow-mindedness represents an alternative and at the same time complementary need for a concept of culture of epochal and worldwide dimensions, that tiny groove – a philtrum of humanity – wherein its enormous requirements are to be fitted.

Narrow-mindedness is a limitation that we cannot overcome, which consequently exposes us to overpowering irony, but it is precisely in the measure of this self-abasement, childlike selfishness, that we see the beauty of love, that we feel in its entirety. The union of Tijana and Ahmet always contains some of that gentle oversight and jealous care that restrains us, thus proving itself. The trembling of one’s narrow-mindedness provides more warmth and closeness than any broad-mindedness. Such a view would be all too susceptible to deconstruction from the perspective of the closed-in character of smaller cultural areas, which would accept the intimacy of their own viewpoint, paying for it through isolation, if the very same view did not contain the necessary precondition of any dialogue – self-understanding. A narrow-minded love announces the hidden assumption of each act of reaching out for the Other – love of what is one’s own. What is released within it is the will for mastering the Other precisely by admitting it openly. Thus understood, a ‘narrow-minded love’ is an exception rather than a rule in culturological and socio-historical concepts, even though it appears in a banal form as the ‘obscene law’ that secretly regulates the conduct of a community.Reference Žižek⁸

What is perhaps needed today is to reverse the relationship between the truth of rules and the falsity of missing. Hans Blumenberg, a German philosopher who is increasingly present in our thoughts, has come up with an interestingly phrased parable in this context – Of the Unmissable Missed Encounters.Reference Blumenberg⁹ Blumenberg quotes an anecdote told by Schopenhauer about a small town whose every inhabitant had a watch that showed the same wrong time, whereas only one of them had a watch that showed the right time. On account of this, he was condemned to arriving at any event whatsoever at an inopportune moment. The moral Schopenhauer derives from this is the tragic fate of one who possesses the truth in a world ruled by fallacy. However, Blumenberg enters into a polemic with Schopenhauer, reverses the meaning of his anecdote, showing the one possessor of true knowledge to be the one who is actually in the wrong. For the truth, argues Blumenberg, is a public convention, which ipso facto excludes the possibility of it being privately owned. There is no such thing as the absolute truth, nor is there any individuality of the truth, only a mutual agreement on it. Hence, the one whom we confidently considered to be the only one who did not miss the truth was actually the one who missed it. On the one hand, Blumenberg wanted to show through his parable that the miss is engraved in what we considered to be unmissable, and on the other, the necessity of the miss and the predetermination of our established forms of understanding when it comes to making that miss. Today, when it appears to us that the quest for the truth has been replaced by a quest for consensus, it is equally necessary to understand the syntagm unmissable misses in its reverse meaning as well. In other words, what happens with misses that are unmissable?

It is to one such miss that Kierkegaard dedicated what are possibly his most inspired lines in Fear and Trembling, or even more broadly speaking, in his entire opus and life. Kierkegaard’s knight of infinite resignation attempts precisely that which is impossible, to achieve authentic contact with another being by renouncing that being and always remaining within the framework of himself and his own love, without another addressee (Ref. Reference Kierkegaard2, p. 42). The power of the idealistic effort to draw ideal fulfilment from real impossibility transforms the failure of Kierkegaard’s knight into a praiseworthy undertaking aimed at overcoming the inherent limitations of the conditions existing in reality. In reality, Kierkegaard’s miss hits the target at a considerably deeper ethical, philosophical or humanist level.

Are we not in a similar position today speaking about a dialogue despite the fact that, in all likelihood, no such dialogue can occur anywhere or at any time in reality, for, to paraphrase Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić, we cannot escape ourselves and our narrow minds?Reference Andrić¹⁰ Does not our ‘narrow-minded love’ constitute a project that can never be realized in the socio-political reality as it is, which can only fail in it, but is capable of providing us with some kind of salvation in doing so? On the other hand, does not ‘narrow-minded’ love confront an interpreter with an impossible task – to base the breadth of a world dialogue on narrow-mindedness – and where does that lead to if, indeed, it leads anywhere in particular?

We should not discard lightly the project of Tijana and Ahmet’s love as a mere naïve-sentimental phantasm, and not only because we discern behind it the possibility of great philosophical systems, Kierkegaard’s philosophy of chivalry and individuality, or Blumenberg’s philosophy of missing. Tijana and Ahmet live in an attic swarming with cockroaches, face to face with the measly reality of personal and social life (Ref. Reference Selimović4, p. 50).Reference Selimović¹¹ Reacting to such a reductionism, they try to preserve their life in its spirit and through direct contact, making use of the tools of happiness left on the garbage dump of culture. Within Tijana’s narrow-minded love, there resides anxious care for precisely everything that is most vulnerable and delicate in human life relations. Perhaps nothing except the protagonist’s poetry could preserve this delicacy, which Selimović at one point compares to a dandelion head,Reference Selimović¹² nothing but such narrow-minded love full of shortcomings. A narrow-minded love is love growing out of human deficiencies, human errors, and that is precisely what makes it capable of preserving that beautiful mistake called humanity, without erasing it.

In other words, the measure of a cultural dialogue also depends on things that we are not inclined to dedicate a lot of attention to in critical discourse, on our unfulfilled desires, shame and painful neuralgic points, a cultural intimacy of sorts, within the framework of the culture wherein we are formed. Epochal projects tend to replace this intimacy with ideology, and they substitute the closeness of living together with cultural values and adopting them with the criterion of usefulness or with mechanical procedures of cultural tolerance. In keeping with the basic idea of cultural dialogue, then, we would like to point out a witty, but no less demanding definition of cultural dialogue coming from these parts. Aleksandar Jerkov, himself also referring to Schopenhauer, compared an authentic contact between different cultures with a contact between two hedgehogs, beyond anything like bon ton, to be found in the truth of cultural interpenetration. Although the cutting edge of cultural differences and challenges must not be blunted, it is still necessary for the hedgehogs to embrace, but to do so in such a manner that they do not ‘pierce each other’s brittle bodies with their prickly spines’.Reference Јерков¹³ Without such an intimate embrace, real contact between cultures is inevitably lacking. It is possible that a good way of initiating this rapprochement is precisely through a re-evaluation of ‘narrow-minded love’, a full and critically-intoned awareness of one’s own shortcomings and a willingness to forgive the foibles of another, despite all of the above, even if that entails, in the words of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, forgiving another’s happiness.Reference Dostoevsky¹⁴

The myth about a tiny groove above man’s upper lip that hides the mediation of an angel reminds us of the need to replace the penetrative technicist truth with agape, even in a secular form, a metaphorical as well as real joining of lips that brings happiness instead of will to power.

The moment at which the message of that love addresses us from the realm of literature reminds us of the original ontological and humanist power of the art of literature, of its ability to mediate through the brittleness of beauty and to preserve in its imperceptible groove the deep, intimate insights of man and culture into themselves. This does not contradict Benjamin's observation that, with the change of media in the twentieth century, art would be reduced to – in very broad terms – its political or utilitarian function, which sums up all too well the mainstream of current literary production.Reference Walter¹⁵

The somewhat forgotten philtrum, even though it tirelessly endures various historical, social and political changes of paradigm, has been reduced today to a bearable, but certainly not exceptionally important, appendage. Perhaps the time has come to ask the question: can one even imagine a human face without that appendage?