Original scientific paper
Judith in Contemporary Croatian Prose: Encoding, Imagination, Stylisation
Maciej Czerwiński
orcid.org/0000-0002-6602-1299
; Jagiellonian University, Krakow
Abstract
The paper analyses three contemporary Croatian novels in which the figure of Judith or the Marulić's epic Judita appears: Pokora (Penance) by Pavao Pavličić (1998), Judita (Judith) by Miro Gavran (2001) and Marulov san (Marul's Dream) by Dino Milinović (2019). The objective is to demonstrate the main lines of the composition in the books, how the figures are presented and what literary effect is obtained as a result. The figure of Judith, then, and the epic Judita are present in Croatian literary fiction, but not in the canonical interpretation, rather encoded anew, novel kinds of imagination and stylisation thus being created.
Pokora is a piece of crime fiction, a thriller, with love story elements, which focuses on the magical capacities of what is alleged to be the first (imagined, of course) edition of Judita: close contact between this book and other books results in these other works having their text erased from them. Various people and institutions are questing for this uncommon publication, including various institutions some of which are oriented in Croatian culture and politics to the local tradition, some to European culture.
Judita by Miro Gavran, picking up directly from the Bible story and not from Marulić’s epic, radically recodes Judith. Having embarked on a love affair with Holofernes, becoming inward with her own womanliness, Judith examines her responsibility to her homeland. At the end she does in fact kill Holofernes, so carrying out her patriotically determined intention, but her hesitation modifies the character – she is turned from heroine into woman. The emphasis of the story is also modified: from collective to individual, from social to psychological. The ethics of Judith’s act, so crucial in the Bible and in Marulić is here tested out and made complex.
The action of Milinović’s crime novel unfolds in Marulić’s lifetime, at the time that Judita was being composed. In Split, the Venetian authorities were doing their best to pillage the ancient heritage, and prevent the Split upper class from complaining about the Turks. The people of Split, including of course Marulić, are presented as patriots who honourably express their love of country, not only the municipal but also the national version. The figure of Marulić, for example, is predetermined by the roles that would be attributed to him by later generations. An important role in Milinović’s novel is played by Chakavian speech, rather, that amalgam of Chakavian and Shtokavian in which the urbolect of the time was stylised. But it is not used by Marulić and the Split patricians, only by the commoners. This Split idiom is marked as vernacular, as the language of the lower classes, which is strange, since Marulić’s poem is actually written in Chakavian.
Analysis reveals that these three novels are differentiated by many of their features. In Gavran, the action is located in Biblical time; in Milinović in the age of Marulić himself; and in Pavličić in the present. The space of the action is, respectively, Bethulia, Split, Zagreb and the whole of Croatia. While the principal figure in Gavran is Judith, in Milinović it is the author of Judita, and in Pavličić, the poem’s readers. The three books have here different effects. In Gavran the figure of Judith is universalised by Judith being released from the role assigned her by Marulić or, if he had no such intention, the role ascribed her by later interpretations (there has been a neutralisation of the allegory). In Pavličić the emphasis is shifted from the character to the poem about the character, only to some extent to the Biblical Judith, the meanings of the book being accordingly investigated, a space being opened for the re-contextualisation of the imaginary geography of Croatia (it expands, from Split to the area of the whole of Croatia). Milinović, placing his action in the age of Marulić, reinforces the existing impression about Marulić, Judita and Split in the 16th century (about the Turkish threat, the arrogance of the Venetians, the honourableness of the Split elite).
It is interesting that all these novels are adapted to popular genres, to the crime or the love story. The Marulić epic, which belongs to literary writing, is thus de-mythologized.
Keywords
Judith; contemporary Croatian novel; stylisation; imagination; encoding
Hrčak ID:
277988
URI
Publication date:
10.6.2022.
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