Jelena Đ . Marićević Balać

Када је реч о сегментирању времена у прози Милорада Павића, може се поделити на: доба године и доба дана. Запажа се да су годишња доба у блиској вези са пролазношћу времена и превладавањем времена, Павићевим односом према миту, традиционалној култури, декору и музици, али и књижевно-историјским категоријама, те са љубављу жене. Како је за свако годишње доба карактеристично одређено воће (духовне очи), Павић сугерише да у складу са добима треба неговати одређен аспект духовности, а да је најсавршенији облик духовности сажет у хазарској воћки Ку принцезе Атех, воћки која се куша без обзира на годишња доба. Павић се што се тиче сегментирања дана, послужио одредницама које одређују време оброка: доручак, ручак и вечера, с тим да је вечера најучесталија. Оваквим временским одредбама, писац се послужио не би ли успоставио једно од сагласја између збирки приповедака: Гвоздена завеса („Вечера у Дубровнику“), Коњи светога Марка („Тајна вечера“), Руски хрт („Вечера у крчми 'Код знака питања'“), Изврнута рукавица („Доручак“),  Дамаскин („Ручак“) . Интересантно је запазити да одређену сублимацију свих временских ознака за доба дана или дан у недељи, а понегде и за годишње доба носи избор приповедака Нове београдске приче. Милорад Павић сугерисао је својом књижевношћу одговор на питање како се супротставити једењу времена и простора, једним делом илустрованим синоптичком картом као представом простора у времену, уз подвлачење улоге престонице (Београда) у окупљању, колективном и индивидуалном памћењу, те духовности.

Chapter 1. ON HEROES AND TOMBS: CHARACTERIZATION AND EMANCIPATION IN THE NOVELS OF MLADEN JAKOVLJEVIĆ
The novels written by Mladen Jakovljević serve as examples of a fully grown artistic need to contrast the past and the present on the one hand, and the dream and the immense power of oblivion, on the other. The world this novelist constructs and explains depends on the trust the reader invests into the narrative structure and the narrator who serves as a guide through it. This chapter attempts at explaining the ways Jakovljević's characters act within a certain setting and a strictly defined cultural frame. Characterization serves the purpose of depicting the clear images of a person and the actions and manners of thought and life connected to these images, as well as the portrayal of one's habits, emotions, desires, and instincts. Seymour Chatman argues that characters are narrative constructs which are not alive, but rather lifelike, more than agents, yet less than real people, describable with the terms from the whole range of human experience which articulate a paradigm of traits with an unlimited number of terms which are not hierarchically ordered.
Chapter 2. BETWEEN THIS WORLD AND THE AFTERWORLD (REPRESENTATIONS OF THE AFTERLIFE IN FADED SOULS BY MLADEN JAKOVLJEVIĆ)
The chapter examines the elements of traditional funeral rites, customs, and beliefs about the afterlife as described in the novel Faded Souls (Izbledele duše) by Mladen Jakovljević. These elements are compared to the relevant ethnographic sources and ethnological literature. A number of essential elements constituting the complex combination of funeral rites (the selection of a burial place, importance of graveyard as sacralised space, and the symbolic importance of candles, ritual food, and drinks, commemorative feast (daća), and All Souls’ Day, to name a few) are creatively (re)interpreted and skilfully used in this novel, with the aim of expressing a distinct view about the meaning of human existence.
Chapter 3. BETWEEN PAGAN MAGICIANS AND CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALISTS: THE PRIESTS IN MLADEN JAKOVLJEVIC'S FADED SOULS
The priest in the novel Faded Souls (Izbledele duše) is a character who treads the border between magic and Christian spirituality. The links between magic and religion are often sought in the pagan foundations, which are credited for the presence of the magical-religious practices in traditional culture. The priest Branko, hegumen Teodosije, and their aide Simeon, who fits the profile of a brigand, more than once walk on and cross over the thin line separating the forbidden from the permitted. These characters, with a broad experience in contacts with the world of demonic forces, perform a ritual for the soul of a deceased witch involving verbal formulas and activities that can be associated with magical forces.
Chapter 4. LIFE, DEATH, AND LITERATURE: METEMPSYCHOSIS IN FADED SOULS BY MLADEN JAKOVLJEVIĆ
The motifs of life, death, and transmigration of souls are methodologically illuminated through the chronotope of the cemetery, an unusual archetypal world existing within the confines of an imaginary afterlife settlement, where a living soul finds himself by chance, a hero who wonders what awaits him —metempsychosis or fading. Based on Foucault’s theory of other spaces, we conclude that in Mladen Jakovljevic’s novel Faded Souls (Izbledele duše) the traditional view of the cemetery, as the space of the other, is reshaped with the narrative line about metempsychosis into the unifier of the worlds of the living and of the dead. The state of the visible-invisible, in which a sense of life is equally felt by both the living and the deceased that inhabit the autochthonous and archetypal world created in the novel, is elucidated in the anthropological triangle, with the mythical markers such as the world axis and its spheric borders. Jakovljević’s novels add to the contemporary and postmodern Serbian fiction a refined sense of deep archetypal images that communicates with Serbian traditional culture and Slavic mythology and embodies stylistically dexterous and polished literary passages about real-life and the world. Faded Souls have established an authentic four-pointed coordination system of the structural organisation of a prose work of fiction, in which the three axes: life, death, and literature create the entire world of the book, to which metempsychosis adds a uniquely relocated life and its duration.
Chapter 5. WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT DEATH: TYPOLOGY OF DEATH IN MLADEN JAKOVLJEVIĆ’S FADED SOULS IN THE CONTEXT OF CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE
Representation of death in Mladen Jakovljević’s novel Faded Souls (Izbledele duše) bears striking resemblance to specific death-related ideas found in children’s and YA literature. The first part of this chapter offers a narratological justification for reading this novel as a work of children’s / YA literature. The second part examines cultural and narratological elements of children literature’s specific representation of death as a vivid portal into the afterlife, where equally vivid communication with the world of the dead is actively practiced.
Chapter 6. IS THERE A WAY BACK?
This chapter explores possible strategies of reading the novel Upon My Return (Kad se vratim) by Mladen Jakovljević and its composition organized into three narrative lines. The line about the present and the one about facing death have autodiegetic narrators, brothers Gane and Filip, whereas the line about the past has a heterodiegetic narrator who uses literary ekavian dialect. The unnumbered chapters, dialogues and monologues are presented in ijekavian dialect, revealing the character of Gvozden as the dominant focalizer, although parts of this narrative line are externally focalized, particularly when describing healing rituals and magic. Time in the two main narrative lines flows chronologically, forward, but also retrospectively, in reverse, towards Filip’s death and towards Gvozden’s illness and healing. The narrative line about Filip, while he is dying, is organized chronologically; however, the drawings of the burning candle suggest departure into a domain out of time. The creek is singled out as the central chronotope and the narrative axis of the novel. In Jakovljević’s novel the elements of the fantastic are rooted in magic, beliefs, and myths, and above all, in the aesthetically and semantically distinct process of coping with the mysteries of life and death.
Chapter 7. A BORROWED LIFE: FATALISM IN TRADITIONAL CULTURE AND CHANGING OF FATE IN THE NOVEL UPON MY RETURN BY MLADEN JAKOVLJEVIĆ
The demons of fate in Serbian folklore are represented by female entities — the enforcers of fate, who decide how long a person will live and how they will die. The fate (what is “written” as preordained), in accordance with the tradition, usually cannot be changed. However, by tapping into rare examples of “borrowing” the years of life in the novel Upon My Return (Kad se vratim) Jakovljević plays creatively with the concept of the assigned destiny by connecting two time plains, two realities, and two fates entwined through blood ties. The fantastic, grounded in the magic of strengthening the thread of life, provides an opportunity to make relatively easy shifts between two narrative lines (the ones about Gvozden and Filip).
Chapter 8. GVOZDEN’S LADDER: DIALOGUE BETWEEN MLADEN JAKOVLJEVIĆ AND MILORAD PAVIĆ
This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the novel Upon My Return (Kad se vratim, 2021) by Mladen Jakovljević. The analysis relies on the parallelisms with the fiction of Milorad Pavić — his collection of stories The Iron Curtain (Gvozdena zavesa, 1971) and his novels Dictionary of the Khazars (Hazarski rečnik, 1984), Landscape Painted with Tea (Predeo slikan čajem, 1988), and The Inner Side of the Wind (Unutrašnja strana vetra, 1991). The key parallelisms are found in the non-linear narrative, concept of time, characterisation, and questions of fate, remembrance, death, and solace. Mladen Jakovljević creatively suggests that the demons of today reside in plastics and technology and, as a counterbalance to them, he subtly offers family love and the world of literature.
Chapter 9. THE LANGUAGE IN THE NOVELS BY MLADEN JAKOVLJEVIĆ
The chapter is focused on the linguistic mechanisms employed by Mladen Jakovljević to authorise, through the characters in his novels, the speech used in and around the village of Tršić. The selection of the marked dialectal features relative to the earlier dialectal surveys of Tršić speech registered in the dialectal landscape of north-western Serbia confirms the accuracy of Jakovljević’s use of the local dialect. The writer skilfully shifts between ijekavian and ekavian dialects, between the authentic dialect and the standard language, as well as between the rural and the urban. Mladen Jakovljević has boldly addressed the linguistic aspects in his novels with the characters who use the local speech, which is very similar to the standard language. To make it recognisable, the author has had to select and use some of its most prominent features. His decision to use the local speech and a considerable number of dialectalisms demonstrates the writer’s linguistic potentials and his keen awareness of the language and its capacities to depict and convey the sociocultural spirit of the time, place, and personalities—the writer’s ancestors who spoke that language.