DESNICA AND THE POSTMODERN FLOATING SUBJECT

Abstract

The analysis of Vladan Desnica’s novel Proljeća Ivana Galeba opens with an insight into the concept of literature dominant in Neoliberalism: such a concept is characterized by the enhancement of the didactical and the ludic function of literature, both of which are based on the need to represent social classes, that is, the need to include literature into present economic issues. We can therefore conclude that the cognitive function of literature is conspicuously missing, and that autopoetic statements of contemporary authors lack the link between truth and literature, which, for instance, is present in Andrić or Broch. This introduction is mandatory to access Desnica’s novel which emphasizes the function of literature to demonstrate naked human truth. The main thesis claims that in this this novel, Desnica foreshadowed the appearance of a floating subject which stands for the theoretical explanation of the character of postmodern Man. Desnica reaches his surmise by confronting the artistic figure of Ivan Galeb against the banality of civil existence, at the same time showing that the very figure is broached by banality, which distances Desnica from a discrete modernist celebration of it. In the passage entitled “Delta”, Desnica symbolically creates the concept of a subject, implying a distance from the artist/citizen opposition, and suggesting the future concept of the floating subject. It is a subject which denounces any form of metanarration and it is centered around a solid identity, effectively distancing itself from the will to power.