The Figure of the Father in the Contemporary Post-Yugoslav Novel and Arrested Development as a New Symptom of Post-Yugoslav Times

• In Event: Rethinking Yugoslav Culture II: Arrested Development in/and Contemporary Yugoslav Culture

Abstract

The paper deals with the figure of the father in the contemporary post-Yugoslav novels Otac (2010) by Miljenko Jergović, Yugoslavia, my Fatherland (Jugoslavija, moja dežela, 2012) by Goran Vojnović and Tvoj sin Huckleberry Finn (2015) by Bekim Sejranović in which the figure of the father is stuck between political and social responsibility, on the one hand, and the inability to make (right) decisions, being seen as a victim or war criminal i.e. executioner, on the other. The figure of the father conceived in this way represents a poetically innovative, ambivalent discourse on masculinity that was started in postmodernist Yugoslav literature, but it also indicates a certain freezing of old poetic and aesthetic conceptions in the literature of the region, which seems to related to the already known patterns of storytelling in its search for those narrative models that will most adequately express the trauma of war, the tragedy of the bloody disintegration of the country and the social tension of transition. The paper discusses the immediate experience of Yugoslavia and its dissolution (Jergović, Sejranović) as opposed to the trans generational experience of Yugoslavia (Vojnović): an ambivalent father figure in this analysis points to arrested development which could be seen as a new symptom of "modern post-Yugoslav times" which reflects a conflict between nostalgic memories of the lost country with the restoration of the seemingly destroyed Yugoslav revolutionary heritage i.e. the renewed struggle for class and gender emancipation that young artists focus in their work.

Author

• Tatjana Rosic Ilic, Singidunum U (Serbia)