CANONICAL BIOGRAPHIES AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CANON OF DAŠA DRNDIĆ

Abstract

Daša Drndić’s literary oeuvre belongs to a separate canon of literary texts that the authoress herself affirms with her writing in search of her own interpretative community away from the canon ruled by hierarchies based on national and ideological categories. Her canon is shaped from an autobiographical discursive position, that is, from the perspective of an authoress who “draws” into her narrative space the voices of other authors and authoresses, most frequently those who wrote about the Holocaust or were victims of the Holocaust. In her writing, she conveys someone else’s testimony or trauma and creates polyphonic prose compositions in which the authoress at the same time becomes the object of representation and the subject of mediation. So, the authoress’s narration is joined by other narrators – Danilo Kiš, Bruno Schulz, Aharon Appelfeld, Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Wisława Szymborska, Witold Gombrowicz, Walter Benjamin and others. By treating the authors’ biographies and their literary texts as equally (un)reliable documents, the selected authors are sometimes joined to her text through their literary texts and sometimes directly as participants in the narrative. The paper analyses three procedures in the function of shaping a separate canon of literary texts: the procedure of fictionalizing authors’ biographies, the procedure for multiplying the implied authors, and the procedure of fictionalizing an autobiographical subject. While by fictionalizing the authors as real historical figures literary characters are multiplied, by multiplying the implied authors the autobiographical position of the narrative subject is strengthened and supported, but in order to weaken the previously acquired authorial narrative position through the process of fictionalizing the autobiographical subject.