Književna involucija: Marinković i Adorno

Starting from Bakhtin’s idea of the novel as a genre in continual emergence and therefore a true representative of modern literature, this paper analyses the novel The Cyclops by Ranko Marinković in parallel with Adorno’s argument on modern literature’s resistance to interpretation by leaving the structure of the work open. Following Vidan’s and Gilić’s insights into The Cyclops’ proximity to Shakespeare, Marinković’s protagonist Melkior Tresić is viewed in terms of a hero whose consciousness has metaphorically turned into a Shakespearean stage. This metaphorical interpretation serves to make binary opposi­tions first introduced by the Enlightenment project as Adorno had envisioned it to collapse, so that the lost integrity of being and art’s aura are returned. The novel in this sense relies on avant­garde techniques such as installation, intertextual insertions, and distortion of the sense of an ending, thus becoming an exemplary genre of art’s attempt to redeem the abso­lute. To this end, the construction of the novel is inspired by distant literary predecessors and another literary genre, conflating binary oppositions such as fiction/truth, mimesis/di­egesis, story/discourse, all of them inherited from the realist novel. Finally, The Cyclops is a response to a disintegrated view of the world, namely that the search for the truth (world, beings, text) is always indirect since the truth is intersubjective.