POSTMODERN PROCEDURES IN THE NOVEL ASH, FOAM,WHISPER BY MILISAV SAVIĆ

Abstract

The novel Ash, Foam Whisper contains the increasingly present literary tendency of fictionalizing autobiography, which is realized in the autofictional genre by erasing the boundaries of fictional and non-fictional narrative. The author not only builds an intertextual relationship with the work of Miloš Crnjanski, but also gives him the status of a fictional character and the position of narrator. The presence of a single chronotope of travel contributes to the spatial dispersion that conditions the abolition of linear temporality. The dual narrative voice of the narrating self and the experienced self is associated with a double temporality, related to the time in which the story is narrated and the time of
the story (narrated time). The rather complex narrative instance in this novel implies the presence of an extradiegetic narrator who is at a higher narrative level and a homodiegetic narrator at the story level. Thanks to the presence of the extradiegetic narrator, subsequent commentary and retelling of events or corrections of biography are possible. This procedure allows the reader to harbor doubts about the credibility of the facts, but also to view it all as the writer’s seductive game that draws the reader completely into the text. The process of historiographic metafiction also enables a critical and parodic attitude towards the past, which manifests itself in the form of a critical examination of some events from the past, as well as parodying the famous myth of the Argonauts and the idea of uniting around the common good in general. We recognize postmodern practices primarily in the use of hybrid genre, intertextuality, the presence of historiographic metafiction, a parodic attitude towards mythology and literary tradition, as well as the use of mathematically precise prose structures that bring prose closer to poetic expression.