But, we can, forget that the motive on the transformation which is discovered the prolongation of the story, is putting in game the dolphin also. “Symbol of the dolphin is connected with the symbol of the water and transformations”, is said in the dictionary of symbols. Therefore we will agree with the conclusion that hole our literature is reduced to caring of the formal imagination11F, because, also as the dream, she isn’t referring on something present and existing but it comes as an result of the need to compensate the thing, that in fact is missing. Said differently: the imagination is recalling in conscious the thing that in some previous system of markers hasn’t success to objectify. Therefore in the dreams, on half way between myths and the collective images, has connection with the unconscious, they are one kind of personalized mythology and for them, with right, can be said that they present mimetically life of the matter.
So, all symbols of the intimate human life, the material imagination is founding in the depths of the unconscious. So, the boy from the narrative world of Prokopiev, is diving in the water to be reborn, regenerated: in the moment when the sea is calling the boy, that call isn’t anything else but the call of the basic element and as a complete, intimate devotion, as a son of the sea, which has own child is turning from the adolescent into grown man and again in child. But, on the other side, the entering in the sea, is in fact, entering in some unknown, secret world which has strong physiological meaning: incest (the original feeling) and the complex of Oedipus must be overcome and turn into a will. We are getting picture credible to the forces of the material imagination, which in the story “Dolphin” is aesthetized on successful way.
But, many things doesn’t from (only) the psychologically, but even from the semiological order of the things, that who is making us conscious from the correlation between literal and the figurative meaning. Therefore, this fairy-tale narrating procedure, which recognizes serial of associations on incestual meaning, we understand it as successful metaphor in the narrative technique of Aleksandar Prokopiev.
But, in the story “A Story about the Snake” with likable jumps from abstract to concrete, from logical to illogical and vice versa, Prokopiev is awakening out the curiosity toward the ambivalent symbols which are pointing to the androgenic arch-unity in the world of the myths. Beside the pointed literacy which assures us that his postmodernist way of expression very successfully is combing the magical, mythical and obscene elements, this story shows that the paradoxical isn’t strange to him, as well.
The snake and a man are typical antipodes – she is at the beginning and he is at the end of the evolution scale. But, being contradictory that, anyway doesn’t disconnect mythically, because in the man there is something from the snake, and she “hierophany of the holly nature” – is that secret something that eternally tempts his spirit.
In Prokopiev’s narrating the snake is mirror of one archetypal situation from the world of the gods: in that world by the example of the Oedipus scenario, the fathers are cutting the heads of their sons, and they turn from dead men into sneaks, taking their wives again. And again is on the scene the primary wish (the incest with the mother that hidden somewhere deep in the forbidden, is reflecting internal contradictory: as material projection on the libido The Snake is one’s son, one’s lover of owns mother. But, beside the taboos, which are forced by the mythological system of opinions, the heroes of Prokopiev again are living their symbols: it seems that in the character of the snake and the dolphin – as realized libido are archetypal imagination of the Eros – they are just seemingly free from the Nature.
But, if we look at the androgyny as restless, dialectical principle, than is clear that, on one artistic way, the author of the story “A Story About The Snake” has some erotically relations also toward the myth: “However, we don’t forget”, says Prokopiev, “that in the magical secret formula of survival, the people snakes doesn’t posses just the power to turn from one into another wonderful shape of this life, but the wonderful gift to come back from the final hole from where returning isn’t possible for those whose only outlook is the human outlook… 12F”
In Prokopiev’s story, the symbol is bigger than the all time dimension. It is that absolute point where the space and the time are crossing: the symbol is living its ancestries, is creating the psychical energy, and is transposed in it. It is sure that the myth pictures and the symbols are presenting the conventional language of psychical, but modified in the fantasy of the character and on some way – waged with the meaning of the culture, they are like going distant from it’s beginning. But epistemological and figurative, the symbol is retaining that previous meaning, which the censure of the conscious hasn’t destroyed yet. Therefore, when we talk about the deconstructivism of Prokopiev, it looks like this attitude of Witold Gombrowicz it would fit him most: “Maybe really the art has to ruin the reality, to ruin it on the elements and to build from them new spirit worlds – in that will… destroying of the sense has its own sense… And the dream is discovering the complete idiotism of that task what to the artist given by some too much classical minds, so it have to be ‘clear’. Clear? Its clearness is the clearness of the night, and not of the day13F.”
When we are already to the stories of Prokopiev, that clearness must be looked outside the frontiers of his discourse or somewhere deep in him, in some arche surface. As unsaid word. Polyvalent and wider even from the sense itself.
Instead of conclusion
The analysis of the stories of Gombrowicz and Prokopiev, as representatives of two different poetical schools, has personally convinced me that initiating the question, which simply was given by the discourse of Gombrowicz, hasn’t excluded those which were forced by the narrative world of Prokopiev. The domination of the dominants in the first and in the second discourse is orienting this research toward one aspect which results (even by price to say, and to contradict of previously said) can be summarized in this following conclusions:
The discreet, depth meaning of this stories in the both story narrators had created – less or more – atmosphere of the virtual reality, but beside the differences – maybe just because that strong erotic note, subtle in Gombrowicz, and explosive and exclusive pornographic in Prokopiev – their art not only that hasn’t lost the contract to the myth, but it hasn’t lost to contract to the real life. That makes them, in some way, archetypal similar on their contents: until Prokopiev is manipulating with the mythological, Gombrowicz manages with individualized symbols, but they both, are after all calling for the mythology.
So, beside the fact that – in structural sense – the comparations are impossible, on level of semiological connotations, sensibilities of Gombrowicz and Prokopiev are compatible. This is possible because the obscene from the erotic and the pressure of the unconscious which we can easily sign to the arche-feeling in Gombrowicz, and on the material imagination in Prokopiev. But, it won’t sound too much if I repeat that the mythology is common to the both narrators. In fact, as to all of us. But, no matter in which – implicit or explicit – they are realizing their literature engagement, the power of their artistic realization is appropriate to carry the value of mythema.
Translated by: Tina Kanurkova
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11. The formal, material imagination, presents movement, power which not only is refreshing the mythological pictures, but simultaneously is transforming and “animation” the traditional forms. But, despite the fact that the transformation is opposite characteristics of the shape, whose essence in a fact is stazical, in the game of semantically limitations of the elements, the material imagination, however, succeed imposing his own influence. With other words, if the forms are belonging to the Culture, than the atavistically symbols of the material imagination are heritage of the Nature, thinks Bachelard)
12. Александар Прокопиев, Слово за змијата, Скопје, 1992, стр. 144.
13. Vitold Gombrovič, Dnevnik I, Beograd, 1985, str. 325.