SLIKA GRADA U ROMANU HODOČAŠĆE ARSENIJA NjEGOVANA BORISLAVA PEKIĆA

Abstract

In this paper, we observe Pekić’s novel The houses of Belgrade with regards to its constituting through urban discourse and its symbolic, meta-poetic and epochal potentials. We are analyzing the difference between two kinds of urban discourses. The first one is represented by the first-person narrator, former housekeeper Arsenije Njegovan, who refuses to admit the existence of the new post-war Communist government and its ideological conflict with pre-war civil society that led to its destruction. Njegovan forms his narrative as a narrative of a modernist subject who is excluding part of knowledge that could annihilate its transcendental existence. That part of knowledge is in fact the other kind of discourse, and it is a discourse of objective historical and ideological situation that remains outside of the first-person narrative. Both kinds of narrative are represented by urban and architectural symbols which create the basic narrative code of this novel. When these two discourse start to come close to each other, Arsenije Njegovan as a modernist subject begins to fall apart which leads to his probable suicide.