"Mašalah, mašalah! Ne budi mu uroka!" Ili Priča o vezirovom slonu Ive Andrića

Abstract

As one of the most authentic occurences in Serbian literature, Andrić's "fitfull elephant baby", the hero of "The story of the vizier's elephant", subverts but likewise reveals the different symbolical, metaphorical, historical, and most of all, human fields. On the first level of this story, the narrator goes for the so-called animalization of the story so as to make the relationship between the authenticity of the baby-elephant and the familiarity of the townspeople more complex. Then, after the tragicomical, Eliot-like, ironically self-described, follows the interpretation of the people as multiple, tropic characterizations of the main protagonist, which is how the townspeople attempt to secure for themselves the status of the subject, and not the object of the story. On the third level of the Andrić's narrative game there is the baby elephant as an entity , he as the creator and the carrier of the story, his reality and his authenticity which destroys the assigned frameworks of the human world in the frame of factography. The language and life of this baby remain solitary and unread in the carnivalesque co-mixture of existences.