Krleža’s Political and Psychotic Bestiary: An Example of Dramatic Menagerie on a Timeline from 1913/1914 to 1970

Abstract

The paper interprets M. Krleža’s political and psychotic bestiary on the example of his plays, beginning with the first fragmental drama Saloma, which opens Krleža’s diary entries (dated 26 February 1914) from the First World War (this is his diary-memoir book Davni dani, subsequently published in 1956), and ends with the screenplay Put u raj (1970), by which Krleža completed his drama work. Focusing on that period (1914– 1970), the paper considers Krleža’s dominant zoo-metaphors in the framework of his negative anthropology. In Saloma, for instance, the zoo-lexeme dog is reflected as the dominant zoo-metaphor. Specifically, for Saloma, everything that happens on war-like Earth is determined by the dog’s existence as a subservient ingratiator toward all forms of power in the government. Instead of O. Wilde’s somewhat precious Secessionist ornamental language, Krleža’s Saloma begins with her aggressive nihilism and with Kyon-metaphors: “Nothing! You are as boring as wet dogs!” (Davni dani, diary entry dated 26 February 1914). This paper identifies Krleža’s dramatic political and psychotic bestiary on select examples (one play per dramatic period), taking into account the classification of Krleža’s dramatic work (18 plays) in five stylistic-generic cycles as part of Krleža’s negative anthropology.In the screenplay Put u raj, a cricket as the dominant zoo-metaphor discloses himself by his singing to the drama binomials (the ego and alter ego: Bernardo and Orlando) in the urinal, while they are urinating together (the male urinating topos) following their narcotic bliss. By combining two issues, the subject of meditation on the death from the novel Cvrčak pod vodopadom and the theme of the eternal repetition of Human Stupidity from the Finale (see the book of political essays Deset krvavih godina, 1937), Krleža rounds out his personal view of the global anti-utopia and dystopia in this anti-war requiem play.We conclude that Krleža’s political and psychotic bestiary which we have examined on select examples using the drama menagerie on a timeline from 1913/1914 to 1970 is consistent: within the framework of a permanent negative anthropology, Krleža’s preoccupation with documenting the all-powerful human stupidity of the man-ape who, when it learned to fly, bombs other apes, although in speciesist zoo-metaphors, we can say that Krleža does not find utopia in nature “as there is no justice even among flowers”, as the title of one of his ballads states. In short, by negating Feuerbach’s anthropological thesis Man with man – the unity of I and Thou – is God and by promoting the Ape to / as Man’s deputy, as Desmond Morris does with the cover of Naked Ape, Krleža shows that Man is at its core and being (the ontological structure of the human being) is not homo sapiens. Today’s pandemic picture of the world demonstrates all of this, or as Krleža would say in speciesist manner: man is still an ape, or as a non-speciesist statement: man is still man, the bloodiest animal.