ON HAPTIC CORPOREALITY IN DIARY OF ČARNOJEVIĆ

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the narrator’s complex subjectivity in the novel Diary of Čarnojević from the perspective of corporeality, with particular focus on bodily experience emerging within the framework of the haptic sensory modality. Our intention is to uncover in the narrator of the Diary a haptic bodily identity, that is, a perceiving subject in whom the sensitivity of the skin (tactile sensitivity, thermoception, and nociception), kinesthetic sensibility, proprioception, and the vestibular sense converge and differentiate. Without losing sight of the complexity of the narrator’s inner doubling, nor of the constant alternation between individual and collective perspectives in the narration, an analysis of haptic corporeality leads us to several insights. First and foremost, we would point to the importance of this type of bodily sensory experience in defining and shaping the narrator’s subjectivity, as well as to the immediate action of haptic bodily impulses in the creation of the literary text. Another goal of the research is to approach the First World War through the body, considering it per se a corporeal issue and a sensory practice perceived haptically by the narrator – through touch, posture (bearing and balance), bodily position, movement, as well as experiences of bodily tremor, weakness, pain, awareness of deformation, falling, and dying of the body. By mapping haptic impressions, also represented in intersensory integration, the literary text can be read as tracing the bodily genesis of antimilitarist sentiment, which constitutes yet another research objective of this study.