THE DRAMATIS PERSON
One of the most important features of the dramatic monologue is the role played by the dramatis personae – the central character in the monologue – because it is through its words that we learn about the events in the poem. It is the only window through which we see and experience the themes, content, and all other characters in the poem. The dramatis personae is the main and only narrator in the poem and according to Genet’s classification is the homodiegetic narrator who even pushes the author himself in the background, seemingly leaving no room for any other authorial intervention or narration within the text itself. Secondly, the dramatis personae, by being the main narrator, claims the role and authority of the omniscient narrator or the strict and dominant authority of the author. However, it never manages to fulfill the expectations neither of the literary genre, nor the expectations of the reader who, during the reading of the text puts his or her trust in it. It is this betrayal or failure, this gap between the objectivity of the author and the fictitious objectivity of the dramatis personae that opens up room for doubt in the reader, which is the first prerequisite for a more careful analysis and assessment. That crack also creates room for doubt in the objectivity, truthfulness and authority of the text, but also in the ideology and social reality that it represents and whose embodiment and materialization it strives to be. The reader is forced as part of the interpretative act to take a closer look at the ideological structure itself, which gives an opportunity to perceive the hidden, suppressed meanings, but also the negations and eliminations of certain unsuitable values and realities, a procedure that ideology always carries out.
THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE IN BLAŽE KONESKI’S WORK
Blaže Koneski in his poetry comes closest to the model on the dramatis personae and the dramatic monologue of Browning in his poetic cycle about Prince Marko, the collection of poems The Embroideress and Prologue Hagiographies. However, unlike Browning, Koneski works in quite different social circumstances. In his case, literature or rather poetry is needed to rise to the challenge of the birth of Macedonian society, as well as to help the process of defining Macedonian identity. It was needed to help the suppressed voice of the Macedonian identity to be heard, but also to enable the adoption and adaption of international cultural and literary traditions and values. His starting point is Macedonian folk poetry, which had to be reconceived within a new framework and in forms that would respond to the demands of the new social moment. Therefore, his poetry represents a space where the voices of the Macedonian people from different historical eras meet and enter into an identity dialogue, Here we can find a range starting from the epic and heroic to the intimate and subjective in the traditional forms of folk poetry, molded into a new modern expression appropriate to the time in which it was created, the period of the establishment of the modern Macedonian state after the Second World War.
That determination of his can best be seen in his Prologue Hagiographies where, on the background of the medieval sacral lives of the saints, he tells the life stories of ordinary people. Blaže Koneski frames these stories in that discourse first through the titles, such as “Life of Bona” and “Life of Tasa Bojanovska “, then “The Assumption of Aunt Menka ” and “Saint Spiridon the New”. Koneski chooses the members of his immediate family or community as characters in his poems, thus allowing him through these different destinies to cover a wide spectrum of characters that reflect and embody the destinies of ordinary men and women in Macedonian history. By personalizing the story of the common man within a traditional genre that is part of the discourses through which history and tradition are transmitted, he manages to include the voice of the common Macedonian individual who was not previously fully covered and given importance in societal narratives, especially in the narratives of the dominant conquering cultures.
The characters in Koneski’s Prologue Hagiographies manage to convey the intimate drama of individual life, but at the same time transcend it and grow into a symbol of the suffering and survival of the Macedonian man and woman. As Mickovic points out, with Koneski, “the representation of the victim is embodied in a quiet and imperceptible way, in life itself, in the feat that is done spontaneously and daily.” (Mickovic , 1986:116). This is especially the case with the female characters such as the White Aunt Aunt Menka, Bona and Tasa Bojanovska , each of whom in their own way represent the experience of Macedonian women and the hardships they faced in order to preserve their family and children.