“Athlantis” – Anthropological Epic Poem of Borislav Pekić

Abstract

The paper deals with the main characteristics and procedures of Borislav Pekić’s model of narration, which is defined as metaphysical and meta-fictional. Decrypting Pekić’s codes asks for continuous research focused not only on the whole achievement that we find in narrative levels, but also looking towards a dynamic and changing structure that exists as a specific semantic absorptive function. Polysemy appears to be an indispensable characteristic of his palimpsest of mythological, historical, psychological and anthropological system of thought, ideas and knowledge, analytically refueling knowable and intuitive sense, the point of separation of circular and linear design sense and the text, and projected through the metaphor of the global history of the human species. A deconstructive treatment of the referential world opens a field for ontological destabilizations of the collective memory, activating the contextual underpinning as well. Search for the essence of humanity and the human mission within the universe resulting in seeing a myth as the essence of human history.