The Broken Mirror of Identity: An Essay on Hadžem Hajdarević’s Prose Cover Image

Razbijeno zrcalo identiteta: Ogled o prozi Hadžema Hajdarevića
The Broken Mirror of Identity: An Essay on Hadžem Hajdarević’s Prose

Author(s): Vedad Spahić
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Bosnian Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: BZK "Preporod" Brčko distrikt Bosne i Hercegovine
Keywords: recent Bosnian-Herzegovinian prose; modern theme; postmodern narrative procedure; grotesque fantastic fiction; dissolution of identity; mimetic prose model; metaphor; metonymy; internal motivation;
Summary/Abstract: Recognizable in the literary world as an exceptionally lyric author, Hadžem Hajdarević has published two prose works by 2016 – a collection of short stories Plastic Surgery Clinic and a novel Where have you been these years. Hajdarević’s stories represent an attempt at eclectic unification of the modernist tradition and the post-modern narrative procedures. The typical theme of modern poetry – the intellectual and his internal world – is treated through self-referential inversion thanks to which the text takes over the role of “the protagonist“, while taking pleasure in the theoretically-inspired questioning of its own performances in a way that could be approximately defined by using the term concetto (a baroque figure that attempts to impress the reader by using the inventiveness of pictures, images and connections between objects and occurrences). Nevertheless, the author succeeds, by using double text coding, to establish communication with different profiles of readers. The consciousness of limitations of reception of this poetics has encouraged Hajdarević, whose public engagement has, in the meantime, intensified in the media and, indirectly, in politics, to focus more decisively on realistic prose and neo-realistic, mimetic writing in his debut novel. The novel is characterized by the imbalance of diegetic and lyricdiscursive layers of the novel, a result of powerful inertia of the lyrical approach in processing realistic content, relying on metaphoric-mimetic and symbolic transposition of the significant particularities, while the mimetic prose model, the author was forced to accept by the choice of the topic, requires, at least equal focus on traditional motivational (psycho-social) mechanisms of supportive elements of the narrative structure.

  • Page Range: 217-226
  • Page Count: 10
  • Publication Year: 2017
  • Language: Bosnian