Ristić and Joyce: Without Measure and Ulysses in comparative perspective
- Autores: Biljana Andonovska
- Localización: Knjizevna istorija = Literary History, ISSN 0350-6428, Nº. 159, 2016, págs. 99-130
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
The article gives the first comparative view on James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Without Measure (1928) by Marko Ristić, the chief figure of the Serbian Surrealism.
We begin with the pioneering role that Ristić had had in the reception of Joyce in Serbian literature; Ristić is the author of the first critical essay on Ulysses („The view on James Joyce“, 1924), based on the article of Valery Larbaud (NRF, 1922) and the first fragments of Ulysses translated in French (Commerce, 1924). Ristić’s continuing reflection on Joyce and his work culminate in the sixties, when he affirms the proto-postmodern sensibility for the Einsteinian universe and illegibility of Finnegans Wake. This reception history and reading affinities serve as an introduction to a more complex and important issue of non-imitative but evident trace of Joycean experience present in the surrealist (anti)novel Without Measure which Ristić has started in Paris in 1927 and published in Belgrade in 1928.
The core of our argument and selected parallels between Ulysses and Without Measure is centered on the concept of a novel as encyclopedia. Ulysses and Without Measure are the rare works that were self-consciously designed and explicitly described by their authors as „monstrous“encyclopedic structures. In both cases the important source of encyclopedic imagination is recognized in medieval allegorism which is adapted to the most provocative implications of modern epistemology, (inter) textuality and heterogeneity of avant-garde literary form. Joyce and Ristić describe and utilize the fragmentary composition of encyclopedic narrative in the same way:
as the possibility for each chapter to start in a new style, technique, tone or genre. One of the most radical expression of that method of composition was the decision of both writers to integrate the autonomous drama into the novel („Circe“, „Eternal liberty“).
Both dramas have the same conceptual framework (hallucination, magic, brothel/ sabbath, midnight, textual unconscious), they are situated at the comparable pre-final place within the global composition of the work and have the same functions of (intra) textual accumulation, synthesis, and recapitulation. Both novels are also designed to have two alternative ends („Ithaca“, „Penelope“; „Eternal liberty“, „Epilogue“), the second one being defined by the syntactic flux and individual consciousness.
Since Ristić is not in any sense imitating Ulysses but creating a highly singular and idiosyncratic work, in a given comparative context the differences are as important as similarities. The number and the consistency of correspondences between Ulysses and Without Measure form a distinctive hermeneutic feature that raises some broader questions, such as: the differences between the extensive mimetic (Joyce) and condensed metafictional (Ristić) paradigm of structural encyclopedism; the new modes of inter-relation between Joycean and Surrealist poetics; or the question of marginalized status of Without Measure within the history and theory of modern Serbian novel, particularly in relation to the opus of Danilo Kiš
