ЛИРСКО-МЕЛАНХОЛИЧНИ ЈЕЗИК У ПОСТМОДЕРНИСТИЧКОМ РОМАНУ: ОБЈАВА БРОЈА 49 ТОМАСА ПИНЧОНА И ФАМА О БИЦИКЛИСТИМА СВЕТИСЛАВА БАСАРЕ
LYRICAL MELANCHOLIC DISCOURSE IN POSTMODERN NOVEL: THOMAS PYNCHON’S THE CRYING OF LOT 49 AND SVETISLAV BASARA’S THE CYCLIST CONSPIRACY

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with the possibility of lyrical and melancholic language in two postmodern novels, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon and The Cyclist Conspiracy (Fama o biciklistima) by Svetislav Basara. The paper argues that lyrical melancholic fragments, scattered in predominantly parodic and self-referential discourse of postmodern prose narratives, appear as a kind of linguistic formulation of the absence of the spiritual and the metaphysical from the life of the (post)modern individual. The novels’ parodic and self-referential techniques erode the traditional literary conventions, at the same time eroding the novels’ protagonists’ sense of understanding of the worlds they inhabit. Postmodern groundlessness makes the segments of the novel in which the protagonists deliberate the world and the self highly melancholic. The language of the novels, which, as all postmodern literature, leaves little or no room for pleasure and identification, contains lyrical fragments that are seen as the linguistic overcoming of deep melancholic discomfort: giving meaning to the meaningless world. The melancholic element is linked to the sorrow for the lost language and the lost context in which heroic, courteous, romantic, highly formal etc. discourses could have their authentic existence, outside of parody and self-referential discourse. Postmodern theorists and literary critics talk about the feelings of nostalgia and melancholy as fundamental elements in every creative process. Linda Hutcheon focuses on nostalgia as an expression of dissatisfaction with modern circumstances, stressing that only combined with irony can nostalgia avoid becoming regressive and revivalist. Ironized nostalgia turns to the idealized past in a manner that allows looking into the past without ever forgetting that returning to it is fundamentally impossible. Romano Guardini and Julia Kristeva emphasize the importance of the melancholic discomfort in literary production, seeing it as potent, constitutional sorrow that triggers what Christophe Den Tandt calls the postmodern sublime, the linguistic overcoming of what at first seems irreducible to language. This paper approches the two novels’ potentiality of style in order to examine the manner in which the lyrical and the melancholic is produced in The Crying of Lot 49 and The Cyclist Conspiracy. The Crying of Lot 49, the text which, to a great extent, both thematically and formally belongs to the modernist tradition, builds its lyrical potential on metaphor, comparisons and descriptive adjectives of a “blurry”, deferred meaning, with a significant presence of figures of repetition. The Cyclist Conspiracy, on the other hand, as a paradigmatic postmodern text, owes its lyrical charge mainly to repetitions, contrasts and inversions, as well as a specific use of negative adjectives, while both texts have a highly pronounced humorous slant.

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