Abstract
The Pilgrimage of Arsenije Njegovan by Borislav Pekić, considered to be the first urban novel in Serbian literature, is analysed from the standpoint of literary anthropology and urban theory. The obsession of the main character is buildings he owns actually as well as symbolically in Belgrade. A distinctive philosophical transformation between a perfect city, urban development and ownership is confronted not only by the prevailing reality of industrial society, but also by urban tendencies within the consciousness of the character. His reasoning and actions reflect the “pulse” of the era toward which he displays resistance on conscious and theoretical planes, despite the impression that he is rather quietly hospitable to it. The novel is analysed in the context of Henri Lefebvre’s metaphor of “The Dispersed City.”
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Notes
- 1.
During Aristotle’s epoch, city-states existed.
- 2.
“Urban semiotics concern the articulation of ideology with settlement space. It represents one of the most recent applications of the semiotic approach to cultural analysis. The field is characterized by the following: a wide variety of approaches with limited critical review; a proliferation of terminology and the lack of its systematization; the fact that virtually all the important work is being carried out in Europe, especially France and Greece; a relative lack of general theories, and, finally, a “weak sister” relationship with its more robust relative, architectural semiotics. […] Urban semiotics is a branch of the semiotic study of settlement space, where that space is the city. This branch of semiotics possesses several objects of analysis, including the material structure of the built environment, the image of its inhabitants, the codes of meaning, found articulating with space, and the discourse of urban planners, analysis and academicians” (Gottdiener 1983, 101–102).
- 3.
About the signifying chain, see Lacan 1977.
- 4.
“Man does not dwell in that he merely establishes his stay on the earth beneath the sky, by raising growing things and simultaneously raising buildings. Man is capable of such building only if he already builds in the sense of the poetic taking of measure. Authentic building occurs so far as there poets, such poets as take the measure for architecture, the structure of dwelling” (Heidegger 2001, 225, 225).
- 5.
“While the romantics are often thought of us being unsympathetic to the city to the point of hostility, this is not completely true, as we see in romantic realism. Here a mystic construct is superimposed to explain its meaning in symbolic, religious or mystical terms. Modernism is the second stage of romanticism, the older view of the city transformed by the new literary techniques. As the modernist move toward new forms of subjectivity, the meaning of the city becomes more dense, until we see the city through layers of historical meaning, or into it blurs into the opaque vision” (Lehan, 5).
- 6.
According to Mihajlo Pantić, this novel could be considered as “the first real, complete, artistically rounded urban novel in Serbian literature,” while the term urbane does not consider the thematic dimension only but also “the homology or equivalence known from Hegel’s and Lukac’s theoretical thoughts, between the urbane epoch and the novel which is a representative form of the epoch” (Pantić ). Pantić also refers to the opinion of Predrag Palavestra, who in his book “Postwar Serbian Literature from 1945 to 1970” claimed that “‘The Pilgrimage of Arsenije Njegovan’ is one of the first authentic urban and urbane novels of the postwar literature.” This is supported by the fact that in the Pekić opus this novel actually begins the historiography of the genealogy of the Njegovan-Turjaskis which is being developed in the “Golden Fleece,” which will announce Serbian literature in the European context that, “with some delay received an urbane genealogical saga of a higher level of literal ranking” (Ibid.).
- 7.
The novel The Pilgrimage of Arsenije Njegovan and Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution both published in 1970, eliminate any chance that Pekić could have been influenced by Lefebvre’s thought. A considerable similarity between Lefebvre’s theoretical analysis of the urban phenomena and Pekić’s artistic expression of the city is rather an indicator of the mutual spiritual agreement between the artist and the scientist, as well as the extent to which an artistic word can be not only a testimony to the spirit of an epoch, but a very serious and well-founded anthropological study.
- 8.
Inability to establish dialogue, misunderstandings and different modes of disregard are present on multiple levels on the pages of this novel, with a specific confusion of the language which follows the construction of any excessive construction. In The Pilgrimage of Arsenije Njegovan the confusion of language was achieved by introduction of the Ijekavian dialect used by the speaker during the demonstrations on 27th March, 1941 whose speech Arsenije does not follow but is preoccupied with the thoughts of his beloved home Nike, in order to respond to a call to abolish the power of capital over people, which then led to the misunderstanding that ended tragically for Arsenije, and the subsequent introduction of a conversation in French with a stranger during the demonstrations in 1968, advises Arsenije that a revolution had started, but Arsenije understands this information as a result of the foreigner’s misunderstanding of the language.
- 9.
Compare with Nietzsche’s protest against the buildings of his time and the analogy which he puts forward between the human soul and the look of houses: “For he wanted to learn what had taken place among men during the interval: whether they had become greater or smaller. And once, when he saw a row of new houses, marvelled, and said: What do these houses mean? Verily, no great soul put them up as its simile! Did perhaps a silly child take them out of its toy-box? Would that another child put them again into the box! And these rooms and chambers – can men go out and in there?”(Nietzsche 2003, 154–155).
- 10.
For a better understanding of Njegovan’s story, Radivoj Mikić argues to differentiate carefully between the synchronous and retrospective timelines of narration – “synchronous includes the events that take place on 3rd June 1968. That day Arsenije Njegovan […] got out of the house to, led by ominous indications, determine the actual state of his homes and property. Having spent 27 years in the house was in fact 27 years of isolation from everything that is going on out there (in the city, in the country, in the world), he does not know anything about the character and direction of social changes that had occurred since 1945. Stepping out into the street, Arsenije was carrying a picture of social relations around the beginning of the WWII, instead he is faced with social reality based on for him yet unknown principles” (Mikić, 15–16).
- 11.
“Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood; you shall make the ark with rooms, and shall cover it inside and out with pitch. Behold, I, even I am bringing the flood of water upon the earth…” (Genesis, 6).
- 12.
The editor of the manuscript, in an attempt to decipher the meaning of these last words, and the state of Arsenije K. Njegovan’s spirit during the night of homeowner’s death, gives interpretations of Arsenije’s last words. They are an encrypted response to Arsenije’s question, as the editor in his explanations actually states the characteristics of modern urban civilization:
And that could mean: Tout cela est un mode (This is all one way, one form);); Tout cela est une modèle (All of this is a form, a mold, a model); Tout cela est un modérateur (All of this is a conciliator, a regulator); Tout cela est un(e) modernization (All of this is a modernization); Tout cela est un(e) modification (All of this is a change, an alteration). (Pekić 2002, 327)
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Bašić, I., Jovičić, P. (2017). The Dispersed City: The Pilgrimage of Arsenije Njegovan by Borislav Pekić in Light of the Urban Revolution. In: Krase, J., Uherek, Z. (eds) Diversity and Local Contexts. Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53952-2_7
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