Literary Navigations. The Sea Imagery of Dragan Velikić

Abstract

This article explores the function of the sea images in the fiction of the Serbian contemporary writer Dragan Velikić. The sea, a traditional symbol in world’s literature, is a key image in this writer’s texts, so much so that it amounts to nothing less than imagery of its own in his oeuvre. Imagery, however, that is very different from that handed down by the sea tradition. The author contends that the sea imagery, disseminated throughout Velikić’s works, allows the writer to create a network of intertextual references within his macro-text. At a deeper level, moreover, this imagery seems to have a twofold function in Velikić’s narrative: on the one hand, it mediates the writer’s complex relationship with the literary tradition of the past; on the other, it constitutes the core around which Velikić builds a number of virtual autobiographies: fictions conjuring up the past, both personal and cultural, permeated with auto-biographical overtones, Velikić’s stories evoke in their male protagonists various aspects of the author’s life, as well as of literary figures of the past, while never really giving rise to a full-fledged self-portrait. Thus, his stories, like ships navigating the sea, traverse several boundaries (between genres, historical and fictional self, past and present, life and literature), creating, through his idiosyncratic sea imagery, a fascinating narrative world.