Dreams of harmony

Straipsnyje analizuojama grotesko raida lietuvių romane. [...] Šiuolaikinis groteskas aktualizuoja gyvybės ir mirties bei individo ir kolektyvo priešybes. Racionalistinis harmonijos siekis ir jos absurdiškumas poliarizavo grotesko sklaidą lietuvių romane. Išryškėjęs dipolis atitinka verčių kaitą nuo tikėjimo humanistiniais harmoningos visuomenės idealais iki netikėjimo jais ir visiško atsisakymo angažuotis bet kokiam tikėjimui apskritai. Socializmo ir postsocializmo kritikos romanuose Ričardas Gavelis akcentavo miesto ir žmogaus vaizdinių negatyvus. Rašytojas sukūrė Vilniaus paveikslą kaip boschiško pragaro variantą ir modeliavo desperatišką jo egzorcizmo programą - savižudybę arba pasaulio sunaikinimą. Saulius Tomas Kondrotas romane "Ir apsiniauks žvelgiantys pro langą" atmetė iliuziją racionalistiškai harmonizuoti visuomenę. Jis parodė du galimus pasaulio atpirkimo kelius - individualų ir kolektyvinį. Tai susinaikinimas arba ritualinis aukojimas bei minios karnavalinis siautulys. Šalia neabejotinai groteskinės raiškos romanų straipsnyje analizuojami ir grotesko paribio tekstai (Jurgio Savickio dienoraščiai "Žemė dega", Balio Sruogos memuarų romanas "Dievų miškas") bei ankstyvojo socialistinio realizmo romanai (Aleksandro GudaičioGuzevičiaus "Kalvio Ignoto teisybė", Vytauto Petkevičiaus "Apie duoną, meilę ir šautuvą", Juozo Baltušio "Sakmė apie Juzą"). Žmogaus bejėgiškumas katastrofos akivaizdoje tapo šiuolaikinio grotesko akcentu. J. Savickio ir B. Sruogos išlaikytas tikėjimas harmonijos tverme ateities visuomenėje būdingas ir socialistinio realizmo romanams. Pastarieji iškreipė realistinio pasakojimo proporcijas, kurių deformacija ryškėja socialistinio realizmo kolektyvinio subjekto vaizdavime ir instrumentiškoje žmogaus sampratoje."The present paper analyses the development of grotesque in the Lithuanian novel. It aims to comment on the conceptualisation of grotesque and make use of some of the definitions offered by contemporary literary scholars as well as focus on the social parameters of this aesthetic form. The article examines the oppositions of life / death and individual / community as actualised by contemporary grotesque images. Grotesque in the Lithuanian novel predominantly deals with the imagery of doom, visions of the Apocalypse, the protagonist' s confrontation with the threatening world, and attempts to dis/harmonise it. The hero in these novels either rejects existing collective values and creates new ones (like Immerselbe in Ignas Šeinius' s novel Siegfried Immerselbe Rejuvenates Himself), challenges collective norms (like Conrad in Saulius Tomas Kondrotas' s novel The Devouring Gaze of the Window Lookers), rebels against them (like the genii of Ričardas Gavelis' s novels about Vilnius) or forsakes values altogether (like the protagonist of Andrius Jakučiūnas' s novel Homeland, who lives by the ethos of "leave me alone"). Grotesque narratives seek to convince us that the reality they represent is "more real than the real". By way of distorting the proportions, authors of grotesque fiction transform realism as an attribute of proportion into an attribute of surrealism. The range of persuasion in Lithuanian grotesque varies from the documentary and its focus on "selective memory" to historical "fabrications" in socialist realism to the cosmogonic myths of evil in contemporary grotesque narratives (the fiction of Gavelis, Kondrotas, Jakučiūnas). Among other things, the surreal nature of grotesque is visualised in the isotopy of the magical agent which is used to transform the world. The figure of the magical agent is constructed similarly to that of the totem - by integrating the elements of the world that do not go together, as in the construct of "animal-man-mechanical device". The variants of the magical agent may be the following: 1. “Real” experiences of war as articulated in factual literature. These experiences suggest a hope that they may cancel the present cynical world order. The cancellation will be triggered off by a magical act: by way of naming and specifying cynicism through the testimony of individual lives, i.e. by exposing cynicism to itself through the destinies of individual people in exile, through human agony and the industry of death. 2. The collective subject of socialist realism as a construct created by people who have lost their sense of mystery, intimacy and privacy. This construct is suggestive of the hope that its struggle and work will eventually save humanity - that it will initiate the global socialist revolution. 3. The new Golem of socialist realism - the socialist hero dissociated from his / her personal passions - in the form of a declarative human allegory, "embellished beauty". This image turns into a mutated form of an immortal, ever - producing man, a socialist perpetuum mobile (Juza, the protagonist of Baltušis' s novel The Story of Juza, rejuvenates himself and even saves the kolkhoz by completing the production plans.) 4. Ethnographic devices or alchemic knowledge. The devices operate by taking the protagonist to a non - historical embrace of Nature as the keeper of human mystery (the brownie and the bat in Kunčinas' s novels Glison' s Loop, Tula), while alchemic knowledge brings man closer to the divine and the spell that has the power to transform the world (smithery and the cannon in Kasparavičius' s novels). 5. Anthropomorphised labyrinths (the temporal, mnemonic labyrinth as the Snowland of Kondrotas; Vilnius as a spatial maze in the novels of Gavelis). These labyrinths uncover the principle of the endurance of evil, which the protagonist has either to dismantle (the sacrifice of the triadic saviour in Kondrotas' s novels) or destroy (the apocalypse caused by Gavelis' s visionary guides). The heroes who used to dream about the harmony of the world in the fiction of Savickis, Sruoga, Gavelis and Kondrotas cannot come to terms with the environment that postulates the illusion of rationalism, progress and the consummation of human institutions. The hostile world condemns these people to suffering and humiliation. The humiliated either lose their dreams of harmonising the world or turn themselves into prophets or causes of the world' s selfdestruction. Grotesque in the Lithuanian novel operates as a polyglot vehicle both for the Romantic idea of world harmonisation and the emerging antiRomantic worldview rooted in the ideas of world rejection and apathy towards oneself (Jakučiūnas' s Homeland). Grotesque fiction has lost its dream of harmony and world rationalisation as a form of both saving (diaries, memoirs, socialist realist texts) and nightmare (the novels of Šeinius, Gavelis, Kondrotas)