engleski

The Narrative Out of Time: Luka Bekavac and the Eerie

In his book “The Weird and the Eerie” (2016) the late Mark Fisher defines “the eerie” as any situation “constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. There is something where there should be nothing, or there is nothing where there should be something.” The main contention of this talk is that the eerie thus defined constitutes an essential aspect of Luka Bekavac’s fiction. While it could be argued that Bekavac’s narrative’s exhibit both aspects of the eerie, i.e. that there are instances both of the failure of absence (“there is something where there should be nothing”), and of the failure of presence (“there is nothing where there should be something”), the focus on this occasion will only be on the latter. It will therefore be argued that a particularly striking sense of eeriness is produced in readers by those parts of Bekavac’s fictional universe which are constructed and presented as purportedly being devoid of time. Given the constitutive nature of time, understood either in epistemological (a condition of experience in general), ontological (an aspect of reality itself), or narratological terms (both at the level of story and discourse), being confronted with a storyworld in which purportedly there is no time, cannot but produce in the reader a strong sense of something essential missing. While such an absence of time is exhibited throughout the entirety of Bekavac’s fictional oeuvre, the novel Policijski sat: slutnje, uspomene (2015) is of particular import in this regard. The novel’s opening sentence: “There is no more time.” is repeated numerous times in the course of the narrative both verbatim and with slight variations. It will thus be argued that this sentence is to be interpreted not only in intrafictional terms, but also as a metafictional statement relating to an essential aspect of the novel’s fictional universe itself and by extension Bekavac’s fictional oeuvre as a whole.

Luka Bekavac, speculative realism, Mark Fisher, the eerie, temporality

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