Fording the stream of changes: The concept of border-zone in the novel by Dubravka Ugresic

Abstract

The article aims to identify correspondences / parallels between the lit-erary text and the “text” of the historical time. The novel of the modern Croatian writer D. Ugresic “Fording the Stream of Consciousness” is taken as a basis: it is considered against the background of the events of the 1980s in Croatia. As the core of the poetic structure of the work, the concept of border-zone stands out. The latter can be traced at different levels of the text organization: in the composition, the plot, the characters, the narrative structure as a whole. The novel describes vari-ous boundaries (mental, existential, state, linguistic). Their function in the poetics of the novel is based on the principles of postmodernism: this is literature on literature. The social and cultural context in which the novel arose also demonstrates the concept of boundary by which the characteristics of the transitional era can be described. The 1980s in Croatia marked the state of transition in politics, economy as well as culture. The article discusses various types of art, cinema, literature and print media that set the main tone. It is shown that in literature, art, and cinema this was a boom period. Access to new frontiers is described by the concept of border-zone, which manifests itself in various ways of breaking the usual hierarchy in art: intertextuality, combining high and low genres (in fi lms and literature), enhancing the role of marginal (youth press), hybridization of media (pictorial turn). The sense of border-zone existence gave rise to “garbage poetics” as a contra-cultural phenomenon of the time. The novel of D. Ugresic contains all these signs of a transitional period. It also relies on the deeper layers of the liter-ary tradition, revealing correspondences with the Balkan model of the world. In this regard, the article touches upon the issue of the bridge in I. Andric’s prose, as well as the stairs in the story of A. Solan. Destruc-tion as the leading principle of postmodernism, the theme of the death of the novel, that manifested themselves in the piece of D. Ugresic, became a refl ection of the transitional time of Croatia, its culture, marked by the symbolic border of existence.