The Sumatraist secret of count Sava Vladislavić's great dreaming: The anamorphosic aim of theatrical doubling, the ex-centred observer, and the regenerative power of collective memory

Abstract

In her discussion of Melanholični snovi grofa Save Vladislavića (The Melancholy Dreams of Count Sava Vladislavić), an opera by Serbian composer Svetislav Božić, the author begins by discussing the composer's operatic allusion to anamorphosis, an architecture and painting technique, in both of its application modes (the perspectival and the catoptric). The trans-media and temporal conversion of this visual tool into the aspect of staged drama is notable in the theatrical procedure of reflective doublings of roles/ characters and production of visual syntactic parallelisms, which deepen semantic relations between otherwise unrelated personages and events from various but important layers of Serbian cultural and intellectual history (Nemanjić, Nikola Tesla, Count Sava Vladislavić). The logic of unclose similarity and borderline contact relates anamorphosis to a special way of ordering the imagery of dreams, whereby the symbolic interiority of a hidden image, the mysterious pattern of sense, may be penetrated only by finding the correct viewing angle. In its longing for the obscure, anamorphosic focalization counts on the ex-centred spectator's capacity to approximate the remote and relate the unrelated. In that sense, shaping the Count's great dreaming by means of a polyphony of oneiric subjects and states and a heteroglossia of remote contexts and other people's stories and lyrical contemplations suggests Sumatraism as a chronotope, as the idea that there is universal connectedness and harmony in the world. The idea of Sumatraist connections informs both the understanding of the opera libretto's inter-textuality (along the lines of the quotation-collage form of the cento, the literary genre) and the arc of association that the composer draws in harmonic-motivic terms as well, in order to produce a special nexus of music-dramatic narration and presentation. In that Sumatraist inter-textual nexus, other people's stories and lyrical contemplations, qua manifestations of a collective consciousness, are deepened by means of a collectively unconscious (archetypal) perspective of a mythical, allegorical, and phantasmagorical dance-pantomime procession, as yet another oneiric form, whose typical Dionysian sequence, intoxicatio-phalophoria-sparagmos, affirms not only the theatrical model of anamorphosic doubling and Sumatraist connections, but also a unique theme in this operatic narrative - transcending sacrifice, tribulation, and death in a foreign land by means of the regenerative power of collective (historical and cultural) memory.