GROTESQUE CHARACTERS IN DRAGIŠA VASIĆ’S STORIES
GROTESQUE CHARACTERS IN DRAGIŠA VASIĆ’S STORIES

Summary/Abstract: When, in 1932, he singled out the characters of Resimić the drummer and Jaćim Medenica as the most plastic shaped characters of Vasić’s prose (I, 337), Milan Bogdanović indirectly sketched another of their identities: his cognition from1922 that “the whole figure of Resimić Sekula, both grotesque and tragic” (I, 306) coincided with his knowledge, from the year 1932, that in Jaćim Medenica, “all the exhilarating tragicomic character of our average man” (I, 338) was stereotyped. Although both stories represent portraits, what binds their connection into a common node is the potential presence of the grotesque in them. The question is whether the grotesque characters are the ones that make connection between them, or if these stories are grotesque despite their thematic diversity? If the stories are grotesque, what elements of the grotesque are affirmed by their diversity? If the stories are not, however, grotesque, whether they contain something identical which prevents them from being so? The status of grotesque in Vasić’s narratives is crucial for understanding of their modernity, because the modern epoch, as one of the three epochs “which can no longer believe in the holistic picture of the world and the inviolable order of the previous times,” is a reliable narrative horizon for the density and seriousness of the grotesque articulations.

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