“NE VIJE DUH IZ PUTI” – LYRIC SPEAKER AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS IN THE POEM OGLEDAM SE U JEZERU BY TIN UJEVIĆ

Abstract

In this paper, the poem Ogledam se u jezeru by Tin Ujević from his book of poetry Ojađeno zvono (1933) is analyzed. A special attention is paid to a complex relation between the lyric speaker on the one hand and the signifying bodies that represent it on the other, i.e. the pronoun ”I” and its mirror image. An ambiguous stance towards both of these figures can be detected in the lyric speaker’s statements, that of a simultaneous recognition and nonrecognition, or more precisely, of recognizing through nonrecognition. Statements of the lyric speaker about the mirror figures that paradoxically both enable it and replace it, are in many ways similar to a relation between subjectivity and its signifying bodies that is introduced by J. Derrida and J. Lacan. In this paper, an uncanny affinity between the idea of subjectivity presented in Ujevic’s books of poetry and prose and how this particular relation is articulated in deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalytic thought is elaborated on. This is most apparent in the lines from the title of the paper: “No spirit is carnal”, that is to say an imaginary spirit, soul or essence of the subject does the subject receive from without, from the other (signifier), from the gaze of the other. In the second part of the paper, the poem is interpreted as a metatextual utterance. When read in this way, the poem opens up a myriad of questions on how it is to be read, i.e. how “a correct way” of reading is impossible to determine, how there is no such thing as a referential reality the poem supposedly mirrors, and how there are a number of contradictory claims that interpretations have struggled to even out and annul. The paper, finally, draws attention to intertextual aspects of Ujevic’s poem, with a conclusion that the poem reflects numerous lliterary reflections of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the myth of Narcissus, rather than presenting its own reflection.