Hvar City Theatre Days, Vol. 46 No. 1, 2020.
Original scientific paper
All of Matišić’s »Matišićs«: Battling the Fiction of Biography, Tanathography and Polisography.
Nataša Govedić
Abstract
Since the text of Matišić’s drama cycle Moji tužni monstrumi from 2019 (My Sad Monsters) was written as a sequel to the previous drama cycle Ljudi od voska (People of Wax, 2016), offering the audience as the central protagonist »Mato, playwright and musician«, whose biography is based on the character of »Victor , playwright and screenwriter« from the play People of Wax, it is certain that these two drama cycles dialogue with each other through a character who is deliberately separated into two names and two contexts, intentionally and formally alluding to the author of all these texts, Mato Matišić, undoubtedly playwright, musician and screenwriter. At the same time, after the premiere of The People of Wax, the Croatian public discussed whether it was a matter of fiction or faction, i.e., whether Viktor (character) is in fact Mate (person), or whether Mate (writer and guardian) is in fact Viktor (writer and guardian), which means that the game of identification has moved from the narrower space of the theatre to the wider space of the media stage, with very little awareness of the fact that the author of all these texts repeatedly toys with public on the topic of deep and historically constant, literary-theoretically stable ambivalence of the boundary between character/face . The stratification of the polemically written »autobiographical« character continues in the cycle My Sad Monsters, because all of Matišić’s »Matišićs« realize that others psychotically know more about them than they do, either because they have read them in the text or saw them on stage – or because they have a personal fiction about other people’s fictions. The sequel to the Drama People of Wax thus brings an extraordinarily complex dramatic/philosophical study of the »reproductive rights« of the author’s authorship, the author’s death and the author’s wider community, as well as a study of manipulation of any psychography, in which not only characters seek their author to deal with Pirandellian reckoning, but the writer at the same time appears both as their prisoner and a parrhesian narrator.
Keywords
fiction; projection; psychosis; autobiography; biography; polysography; Mate Matišić
Hrčak ID:
246609
URI
Publication date:
20.10.2020.
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