DEFORMATION OF A CULTURAL MODEL IN THE ANTI-WAR NOVEL

Abstract

In the novel Hero on a Donkey, Miodrag Bulatovic dealt with the theme of war according to the principle of Menippean satire, without epic sublimity, distancing himself and denying mythic value by creating an antihero. Such a radical critical attitude toward literary tradition is the result of the activation of the carnival and grotesque code. The war chronotope, which always appeared in Montenegrin literature as an extremely fruitful soil for emphasizing the moral purity and firmness, integrity and sacrifice of a Montenegrin woman, enabled Bulatovic to distort female characters under the prevalence of carnival imagination that does not know the limitations. The characters in this novel represent the utmost contradiction to traditional female characters. By carnivalizing the narrative reality, Bulatovic degraded and inverted both the traditional and the revolutionary axiological system, and thus established new orders of things that, in relation to the basis from which they originate, represent extremely opposed semantic strings. The collective as the imperative of existential and moral survival in the war chronotope is broken down by the complete suppression of any form of collective interest and during that process individuality is placed in the center of the diegesis. Working on the theme of the war under the influence of the process of carnivalization, the author creates a powerful antiwar novel, whose wicked, to the core diabolical narrative reality, desemanticizeall the categories that Montenegrin culture on the one hand, and the communist ideology, on the other hand, have placed on the top of the moral scale.