engleski

Institutions and Falsified Culture in the Novel Evening Act by Croatian Writer Pavao Pavlicic

In one area of his prose work, the Croatian writer Pavao Pavlicic belongs to a group of writers in the 1970s who used a fantastic narrative model and thematised irrational parallel worlds as opposed to a realistic model of narration. Pavlicic's novel Evening Act (published as Vecernji akt in 1981) has a realistic beginning, but it slips into fantastic narration when the main character, a young man called Mihovil, discovers his ability of falsification of documents and works of art. At the same time, he is capable of recognising falsified artistic works and documents that are accepted as an integral part of social, cultural and historical memory. When his ability becomes dangerous, Mihovil falsifies his own body to escape from his unbearable reality. This paper will analyse the function of the fantastic model in Pavlicic's novel as a postmodern game with Croatian and world literary and cultural tradition. The ludic layer of the novel has a high symbolic value: it draws attention to the relationship of cultural institutions and society towards the authenticity of artistic works, the role of art and the ways of preserving (or destroying) cultural memory.

fantastic literature ; the notion of originality ; parody ; Croatian writer Pavao Pavlicic

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