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POSTSOCIALIST AND GOTHIC ELEMENTS IN THE NOVEL CATHEDRAL BY IVO BREŠAN
Sanja Franković
orcid.org/0000-0002-2086-8419
; Facultatea de Limbi şi Literaturi Străine,Departamentul de Filologie Rusă şi Slavă, Bucureşti, România
Sažetak
This paper analyses the Gothic elements in the novel Cathedral
(2007) by Ivo Brešan. The frame story, which thematises
the narrator’s life and the Croatian War of Independence
in the 1990s, is intertwined with the story he writes
about St. James Cathedral in Šibenik. After he was forced
to leave the University of Zagreb due to his communist past,
he worked in the museum of Šibenik, where he translated
Latin historical documents. He appreciated the originality
of past geniuses and despised contemporary spiritual and
architectural uniformity. However, in romanticising modern
culture, he used the postmodern grotesque profanation of the
sacred, the Gothic diabolisation of Petrarchist love and the
interpretation of history as a sequence of strange events. The
irrationality of the romantic layer is caused by a ghost of an
unhappily deceased young woman Klotilda, whose character
is a postmodern ironisation of Petrarch’s Laura and is
seen by mentally unstable men. In the historical layer, the
motif of cannibalism indicates an individual revenge on the Venetian conquerors. The narrator supplements incomplete
facts with fantasy, emphasising that even historiographers
cannot avoid narration in their “necrophilic” search for the
past. Gothic elements are combined with grotesque and carnivalisation
and are evident in the portrayal of male characters
as symbolic androgines who defy social norms with
their female gender traits. In Brešan’s novel, they emphasise the perpetual antithesis of beauty and human perversions in
an ethical, grotesque and fantastic dimension. However, the
tradition of Gothic novels is ironised at the end, in which
the mystery is not resolved, but is created by the narrator’s
disappearance in his own story.
Ključne riječi
historical novel; Gothic and grotesque elements; postsocialism; Ivo Brešan
Hrčak ID:
268248
URI
Datum izdavanja:
27.12.2021.
Posjeta: 640 *