FRAGMENTARNI IDENTITET GRADA I PRIČE U ZIMSKOM DNEVNIKU SRĐANA VALJAREVIĆA

Abstract

Srdjan Valjarević's Winter Diary thematizes the city by pointing out its multiple fragmentation, through which the writer reflects the awareness of the literary story, itself fragmented both by the ambivalent voice of the narrator-writer and by the divided identity of the heroes. Disorienting its inhabitants physically, but above all mentally, Valjarević's Belgrade acquires the features of a Megalopolis, no longer reflecting the city in the humanistic assumptions of its connection with culture and society, but in a kind of over/non-urban consciousness that decenters the originally centered city space, emptying it of its metaphysical potential. Such a perception of the city becomes a constitutive part of the consciousness of the narrator-writer, a Baudelaire's flaneur who, in contrary to the general disorientation of the city population, tries to resist the destructive city power by following the traces of the story's humanity. Framing man in automatism, slave-robotic action under the guise of freedom of (self) choice, the city in Winter Diary portrays a simulacrum space. The question arises whether the former, for the modern being affirmative challenge of encountering the urban, can be reconstructed through writing, story, and telling. The problem of the non-humanity of the city in Valjarević's work is framed through the question of motivation that the human being implicitly draws from literature itself, as well as the question of its participation in the revitalization of the connection between the city and humans, their identity as an ontologically unproblematic and complete forming.