Ivan Cankar’s National Narrative and Its Role in the Formation of the Slovenian Cultural Identity

Abstract

Ivan Cankar (1876–1918), who occupies an honorable place in the Slovenian cultural canon, once changed the course of development of Slovenian literature and influenced the formation of national identity. The national narrative of Cankar was based on contradictions: living far from his people, he sometimes glorified them and sometimes attacked them with heavy criticism; he correlated his homeland with his mother, the mother though being dead. Cankar’s concentration on the subject of mother and homeland is interpreted here in the framework of psychoanalysis. Following Slavoj Žižek, the author develops the idea that it was the mother who became the Symbolic Order representative or Super-Ego for the writer. The concept of “Cankar’s mother”, which became a symbol of self-sacrifice and at the same time repressiveness in the Slovenian cultural space, is considered.