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“Why do You Have Such a Beautiful Hair?” On the Allegedly Disappeared “Bosnian” Story Zulija Merkez by Victor Tausk
Borislav Mikulić
; Sveučilište u Zagrebu
Sažetak
This paper deals with the 1908 short story by Victor Tausk titled Zulija Merkez about a girl which killed her newborn child. In the Tausk studies since 1970s the story has been known only by reputation as the other “Bosnian story,” besides that of Husein Brko, and generally considered “lost”. In the paper I argue that the story, with an unnamed I-narrator as a court officer in the introductory dialogue with the girl charged with child murder, reflects Tausk’s genuinely literature-centric stance founded in the subjectivity principle of literary modernism, which obliges us to not take either of Tausk's “Bosnian novellas” anachronistically as effects of psychoanalysis but, quite to the contrary, as autonomous acts of literary creation which subsequently pave his path to psychoanalysis. I consider Tausk's 'I' in the prologue as a literary sample of self-referential narration from Homer to contemporary writers, which enacts the so-called poetic function of language that, later on, was formulated in Roman Jakobson’s linguistic theory. It is this function that echoes in Jacques Lacan's idea of a “true subject of the unconscious” and cannot be sufficiently understood primarily as the place where, according to Lacan, the speech of the reflected Self comes from but also as the place where the desire of the subject comes from as desire of narration. In conclusion, I try to corroborate this insight by tracking Tausk's self-portrait of the court investigator with a “blond mane” back to the structurally more complex 1884 crime novel by A. P. Chekhov Drama on the Hunt about the murderer of a young girl in the person of a law officer and I-narrator with “beautiful blond hair”, appearing just like Tausk’s in the 1912 description by Lou Salomé in her Freud-Diary – as “the blond beast”.
Ključne riječi
Victor Tausk; the lost story Zulija Merkez; the I-narrator; self-referentiality in narration; the poetic function of language; Lacan's subject of the unconscious
Hrčak ID:
322290
URI
Datum izdavanja:
11.11.2024.
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