The Carnivalesque “monde a l’envers” and the Parody in the Novel “The Burlesque of Master Perun, God of Thunder” by Rastko Petrovic

Abstract

This text conceals a few different theoretical problems, which are basically alike. The main standpoint is one prominent text, that pertains to the Serbian avant-garde literature-“The Burlesque of Master Perun, the God of Thunder”, whose author (Rastko Petrovic) managed to incorporate manifold of diverse texts into a single novel, using parody as a way of transforming the past tradition, both literary and cultural. It it most important to notice the way this parody is being enriched, the carnivalesque, defined (by Mikhail M. Bakhtin) as a sum of different cultural models-texts, ritual and visual forms of presentation, gestures, street communication, etc. In Petrovic’s novel, spatio-temporal correlations are being irrevocably confronted, the way of living in the Slavic paradise, and in Devol, Nabor Devolac as typical antihero, and parody of the epic hero, but Petrovic also tries to obtain a total disintegration of the structure and the sentence through parody. There are many kinds of verbal constructions, that truly characterize the narrator in many ways, colloquial, everyday, thus creating a distinction between the auctorial, and the personal narrator. The end of the text provides (through merging of accents) a new integrated perspective. Basically, through the way parody is arising and spreading, we can also figure out the carnivalesque as a specific way of sensing the world. The identity of several characters is changed in a playful manner, thus reinforcing the parodic discourse, which is powerful, and ambivalent. In this novel, parody functions in a wide range, from characters to stylistic transformations, and change of reader’s/author’s perspective. We consider the generic determination in the title as totally conditional, since the novel does not permit to appear the judgmental dominant ideology, which could otherwise define subaltern consequents (burlesque is characterized usually by its law style, and honorable characters).