Original scientific paper
Imagological Aspects Of Borislav Pekić’s Rabies: On The World That “Keeps To Its Favourite Misconceptions When Standing Before Death”
Željko Milanović
; Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad
Abstract
The novel Rabies (1983) focuses on the outbreak of a rabies epidemic at London’s Heathrow Airport and efforts to stop it from escalating into a pandemic. Rabies is the first part of a trilogy that includes novels 1999 (1984) and Atlantis (1988). This trilogy, most often defined as anti-utopian, is rich in literary interventions characteristic not only of popular literature, but also of postmodern literature that accepted the creative homogenization of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” literature. The schematized literary devices of popular literature include the superficial characterization of protagonists. Such characterization, considering that the plot of Rabies takes place in the international context of an airport, implies the presence of ethnotypes, which have the power to motivate the protagonists’ behaviour in a decisive way. Starting from the recent methodological assumptions of imagology, the paper examines the presence of genre-related stereotypical characterization of protagonists (the author himself never denied the popular genre influences in the work), the protagonists’ attitude towards the culture of the Other and the possible correlation of national characterization and behaviour. Despite the emphasis on the dependency of culture on nature, the plot twist at the end of the novel testifies to Pekić’s departure from the belief that collective identities take precedence over individual ones: in the altercation of newly created superhumans, who not only have a chance to be the sole survivors of rabies, but also to establish a new species on Earth, there are no winners, because they are no different from people who believe that the collective is above the individual. The imagological reading of Pekić’s novel is not an alibi for its dominant genre-centred poetics, but an attempt to understand, conditionally speaking, the imagological aspects of the pandemic that was raging at the time of the novel’s writing. Without the idea of possible extrapolations that Pekić’s work could provide, the conclusion of the paper discusses the agreement between the imagological objectives of the research, which are often not exclusively of a literary nature, and Pekić’s novel.
Keywords
imagology; ethnotype; stereotype; characterization; topic of epidemic
Hrčak ID:
267713
URI
Publication date:
16.12.2021.
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