hrvatski

Intertekst slavenske mitologije i elementi magijskoga realizma u romanu Dubravke Ugrešić Baba Jaga je snijela jaje

The elements of magical realism, present in Croatian literature from the generation of the „Borge-sians“ of the 1970s, occasionally appear in recent examples of Croatian novelistic prose. This work will investigate how they are enacted through a Slavic mythical intertext in Dubravka Uglešić’s novel Baba Jaga je snijela jaje(Baba Jaga Laid an Egg) (2008.). What we are dealing with here is with a unique text in Croatian novelistic prose of the 2000s due to its inventive inclusion of mythlogical, ethnographi-cal, ur-Slavonic and pre-Christian layers in a hybrid genre novelistic form, constructed through the author’s well known ‘patchwork’ poetics. As critics at this moment have recognised fantastic and fairy-tale elements in it, while the author’s procedures have primarily been linked to a homage to the Russian avant-garde, in the first of this work a brief theoretical overview of the history and meaning of the concept of „magical realism“ will be provided, as well as its relation to realism and the fantastic. The characteristics if magical realism are here recognised as a narrative mode, which can be entirely incorporated into the genre hybrid, intertextual and interdiscursive multi-layered nature of the no-vel. These are: the irreducible elements of magic (the characters’ inexplicable powers and features, their influence on special and temporal relations as well as on the relationships of other characters, without any sense of bewilderment or disbelief) ; a detailed description of the world of phenomena (a mimetically represented reality of the life of elderly women as well as the urban spaces of (South) Eastern Europe) ; the concordance of contradicting understandings of occurrences ; the unification of different domains in the perception of reality (a lack of surety in the information received by the bodily senses) as well as a breach in the commonly received ideas on space, time and identity. In the entire novel an inherent sense of the marvellous is present underneath its mimetic framework, through which the transitional reality of post-communist countries (as a contrast between impoverished and decaying urban quarters with the decadent luxury in the highly stylised spaces of hotels and spas). The marvellous, with which the network of the intertext of Slavic Mythology is linked to the construct of Baby Yaga, is something by which almost all the female characters in the novel are characterised. An expansion is also present of the semantic potential of the mythologeme of Baba Yaga on a variety of textual and narrative levels, and the semantic field is especially expanded towards the fields of parody and the grotesque as an emphatic aspect of the conceptualisation of reality. The figurative nature of the characters of the elderly women, founded on a mythic intertextuality, has already been recognised as a form of the construction of a transitional (contra)identity (Detoni-Dujmić), and in this work it is interpreted as a figure of the voice of a suspended subject between two discursive systems: the transitional ; the dominant and colonising, in which an elderly woman is a degraded object on the margins of society and a culturally submerged, mythic system in which an elderly woman is frighte- ningly powerful. According to S. Slemon and L. Hutcheon, the aim of magical realism is the creation of a liberating poetic for the suspended subject in the various contexts of marginalisation. And yet, Baba Yaga should not be interpreted exclusively as part of a superficial feminist ideologeme, but as the grotesque conceptualisation of old age and the very inscription of the mythic intertext in the figures of the elderly women can be linked to a critique of self-identity in the old age. As S.de Beauvoir had once claimed, it has its causes in the presentation of one’s identity through the perceptions of created another, and through this the novel, with great engagement, questions the necessity of the personal, critically considered and auto-reflexive approach to both one’s own process of ageing, as well as to those social practices which influence this experience. Although the basic framework of this novel is feminine ageing, due to the elements of magical realism in the construct of the transitional reality of the nations of (South) Eastern Europe (additionally marked by the consequences of the war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the everyday lives of women encountering with their own bodily decline and the poor functioning of their cognitive abilities, as well as with isolation and poverty in a society overtaken by consumerism. It must be noted that due to the aforementioned mythological intertext on the witch Baba Yaga, upon which magical realism as a mode of narrative relies here, Baba YagaLaid an Egg represents an innovative text within the corpus of Croatian novelistic prose on the theme of transition, so that due to the presence of its characteristic imaginarium we can place within this narrative model (despite some differences) which are represented in it.

intertekst, slavenska mitologija, magijski realizam, hrvatski roman, tranzicija, Baba Jaga

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