Pripovjedni postupci u tvorbi sjećanja (Mirko Kovač, Grad u zrcalu)
Narrative procedures in the creation of memory (Mirko Kovač, The City in the Mirror)

Author(s): Sanja Franković
Subject(s): Croatian Literature, Serbian Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Fakultet humanističkih nauka, Univerzitet »Džemal Bijedić« u Mostaru
Keywords: memory; narrative procedures; spatial metaphors; Mirko Kovač;
Summary/Abstract: The paper analyses the narrative forming of personal and family memories in the family chronicle The City in the Mirror by Mirko Kovač. The mechanism of writing out memories through the mediation of the characters and spaces (houses, cities) is subverted at the same time, whereby different narrative strategies can be discerned: 1. In his autoreferential notes, the narrator emphasises a lack of equivalence between life and memory and his own subjective will to speak about selected events and in the order established by he himself; 2. His memory is also objectively disrupted by interrupting family and kinship ties and by wars and floods, which change the space and people’s way of life; 3. Family memory which precedes the narrator’s life is mediated by the remembered stories of the focalisers, older family members; 4. The narrator connects the space of childhood and growing up with the destinies of peculiar people who lived in it, so his writing memories means the creation of personal geography too. The titular metaphor of the city in the mirror refers to the city as the main character, identified with people who live in it or reflect about it, and the heterotopic character of memories, fixed in the written text like in the mirror, but deprived of the real geographic space. Thereby memory gains the status of one of the possible interpretations of life.

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