Susret i udaljavanje kao književna dekonstrukcija rata
Encounter and Detachment as a Literary Deconstruction of War

Summary/Abstract: In the paper, we take as our starting point the reflections of the members of the Frankfurt School (Benjamin, Adorno) on the decline of the value of experience and the consequent impossibility of narrative after the experience of war. In this case, the apocalyptic landscape of the post-war period would be barren even for literary texts. However, since this is not the case, it is necessary to reflect on the possibilities and implications of a literature that deals precisely with war, the destructive human activity that impoverishes so much, and yet enables the construction of a narrative text. In order to justify such a literary work, it is necessary to draw on those conceptions of war in the framework understood as an encounter of two subjects that runs through the works from Clausewitz to Derrida and his concept of rencontre. On the other hand, it is necessary to consult those theorists who presuppose detachment as a prerequisite for understanding war and its critical reflection and who believe that it is only possible to know war from a temporal and spatial distance (Freud, Adorno). Mathias Énard’s novel The Zone will, therefore, serve as a very suitable space in which the encounter with war and the distance needed to know it and think critically about it are exchanged in terms of content and form. The narrator, traveling by train, encounters the various actors of many wars in his consciousness, whereby the specific narrative of the stream-of-consciousness technique creates a formal distance to the narrated content. The Zone thus shows the possibilities of literature that deals with war and provides a different idea of artistically designed texts about war than the one that claims they are impoverished and impossible.

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