Original scientific paper
“Getting out from oneself”: I as double and becoming anonymous in Janko Polić Kamov’s novel Isušena kaljuža. On desubjectification in Diderot, Maupassant and Kamov
Aleksandar Mijatović
; Faculty of humanities and social sciences at the University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia
Abstract
On the final pages of the first part of Janko Polić Kamov’s novel Isušena kaljuža (A dried out mud-pool), called Na dnu, the narrator refers to a famous Guy de Maupassant’s short story Horla. While for Maupassant Horla is the spectral apparition of the other, for the narrator of Isušena kaljuža Horla is a spectral apparition of the self as the other, of the self as a neutral non-self, no-one. While Maupassant experienced horror in the face of the possibility of such creaturely life (E. Santner) that dwells on the threshold between visibility and invisibility, the narrator on the contrary welcomes the possibility of non-being that cannot be reduced to the ontological opposition between being and appearance, and juridical and moral opposition between self and other. Similarly, the narrator of Maupassant’s short story Lui? recounts the events as they are presenting the encounter with the external other. However, Maupassant’s narrator encounters himself as he became a neutral no-one; himself as his own double. In the same way, in the next parts of the novel – called U šir and U vis – the narrator undergoes ascetic transformation through which he becomes released from himself. That becoming no one – getting out from oneself, as Kamov writes – is seen as the main technique of resistance to the disciplinary power which operates through juridical forms of authenticity and individuality. That ascetic self-transformation as an affirmation of the “right to disappear” (Blanchot) may be (yet another) explanation of the final words of Isušena kaljuža: ‘Ja nisam ja’ (‘I am not I’).
Keywords
the self; narrative/narrated identity; actor; ipse/idem; enunciation; pronoun I; potentiality
Hrčak ID:
174601
URI
Publication date:
1.12.2011.
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