An empty model and a sad queen

The subject of our gathering, concentrated on the question of love in literature, may be of better help in grater deal then some systematic solution. In stead of big methodological preparations, maybe thinking about this relation, literature and love may in better way be written in the crisis of the theoretical literature thinking today? Better, because is accidental and determined before all with the personal interest for the literature, which is also a form of love, and sentenced to love, as highest expression of all that make us human – for love make us human.
It is an important, new possibility: to look at the literature face with the eyes of love, to presumed love to the theory and methodology of literary studying. At this point, however, already come in help the thinking of the literature, in a very familiar, old, its classical expression. For, when one says that love is the one that make a man human, then an old image comes back of how in the literature a new epoch of human history is beginning, the one in which the archaic time of non-reflected heroism ends with the most well-known tears of the greatest of all heroes, which were living on the earth. In Achilles’ tears for the dead friend and for its own mortal destiny, which see the face of parent’s morning over the dead child, a new type of humanity is determined. From on hand, the determination to confront the death, as a better man’s destiny, and on the other hand starting feeling and comprehension in the beauty of life – which in Odyssey’s the Achilles’ words about how it is better to be the most miserable life being that a dead hero, will give a special dimension. However, if it is taken into consideration the composition and the basic thematic, Iliad is in many things actually an Achilliad. In that case it is good to remember of a remarkable study – to increase our pride, it is a work of our man, Milan Budimir – who piercingly pay attention to that, that Iliad epic is about the Achilles rage and the fight of Greek heroes, but also an epic about Achilles’ love.
It is not only the hero’s dignity violated when the slave women were wringing, but also the love feeling. Briseida must be returned to the hero untouched, for she is not just a slave woman. The base of Iliad is doubled, and in key moments the motive of love is interweaves with the one that attracts most attention, the heroic decoration and hero’s honor. To this has to be added only Helena’s image, not only as beauty symbol, but also as a women loved so much that Menelaus forgive her the infidelity, so in the secret of love the epic starting power could be seen. In truth, it could be, with good reasons, Achilles’ rage and Greek defeats expound as teaching about the ominous dissension among the heroes, which would be very valuable to listening it today. It could be brought up in connection with the other Homer’s epic, however with just a little interpretation freedom, it should be said straight a way that even the Odysseys could be read as epic of family love and faith, about the secrets of marriage lodge, and that no life outside of the own home and own family could not satisfied a man, about the necessity to come back where a man was born and were man with family ties belongs. It is more stronger not only from an adventure, but also from an erotic love, which to a seductive and wise story teller, as Odyssey is, does not lack, especially not in the embrace of fascinated goddesses.
Here we are now, of course, living now a side the companions or tribal’s love Sapfe, another high ideal and living the question of tragic guilt, which has replaced in the base in the play love and passion, how we are meeting with the truth, in the following epic form, again: for the successor of the epic, from antique stories until the baroque novel, decisive is the love entanglement. There are no antique story without love, but it is not love baffled and annulled with ominous fate, but it is love challenged with difficulties, so that in the end will show all of its power and magnitude. The disentanglement of the love novel, in which triumph the devotion of one being to another, discover something about the very meaning of the story telling, which is, perhaps, later forgotten. And that is that the story rewards, it does not fail, story, just like the tale, has in beforehand an promised end, that talks about regained harmony in the world, about the joyful union of being, about the fulfilled success and social progress. How has the thinking of the literature approach to that? When it is talked about the antique, this characteristic of union fits a special anthropological perspective in which the wholesome of the human being and life is never disregarded.
The model of that uniting thinking confirms the relations of truthfulness, beautiful and goodness, or high ideals kalkogatije, hence the thinking about literature and its educational significance of literature for man and his psyche, character, does not exclude from what a man is and how he lives, and do not deduce on literary form and verbal expression. That is immediately directing us to the solely core of anthropological and humanistic problems, to the big crisis of thinking about literature in the twentieth century. The contemporary thinking about literature is caught with what is going on after the heroic period of methodology and theory. The heroic raid of all forms of story telling and letting one know the knowledge has ended in that way, that the theory of literature has discovered its own significance for all of the social sciences and all of the forms of story telling as such. In the moment of highest reach of thinking about literature, the so long expected influence of thinking about literature on the course of the history of the dominant knowledge, from philosophy to psychology, and suddenly in front of the style of the critical thinking and the sensibility which in it comes in expression has opened an abyss of new insignificance. How has the critical thinking get into this ominous sheer rock, on which also other styles of thinking has meet with the end as equal happening of the history?