DUGME: POETIKA SIMBOLIČKE MINIJATURE U DNEVNIKU O ČARNOJEVIĆU MILOŠA CRNjANSKOG I HAMLETU VILIJAMA ŠEKSPIRA

Abstract

The paper analyzes the narrative and symbolic values of the button in Miloš Crnjanski’s novel The Journal of Čarnojević. In the perturbation that occurs when the hero, during the meeting with his beloved, angrily but inadvertently tears the buttons off her dress, traces of the gap that will determine their marital relationship can be recognized. The button that falls and exposes the girl is a sign of overstepping and destabilization of the ontological union of two beings. This destabilization – the rudeness of the hero, the agitation, the withdrawal and fall of the woman – is determined by the self-challenging forces of the subject itself. The crisis as a state of the modern subject in Crnjanski’s novel is viewed against the relationship between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ophelia. The button in Shakespeare’s dramatic literature, a sign of disruption of order and of the negation of action, is a sign of theatricality and dissembling; the unbuttoned Hamlet seduces Ophelia, and others through her, painting a coldness falling quite short of the lyricism of Crnjanski. In fact, it seems that only against this tense lyricism can Hamlet be made ready to be read as a lyrical misinterpretation of arid theatrical coldness. The lyrical force of modernity in Crnjanski’s novel transforms the torn off buttons into marks of nightmarish existences, upheavals of old ideas and concepts, the dismantling of the categories of subject, identity, history, metaphysics, language. A symbolic miniature, a button is a scene on which an entire poetics presents itself.