Historical Firmonautics of the Njegovan Family – The Trade Motif in Borislav Pekićʼs Golden Fleece

Abstract

Diachronically considering the historical duration of the Njago/Njegovan family, especially the relations between fathers and sons, that is, grandfathers and grandsons, the paper aims to illuminate how Pekić’s Golden Fleece shapes the trade motif and its immanent phenomena – origin and basic principles of trade practice, nature and characteristics of money, the notion of desire as an exchange source/accelerator, the genesis of the motif of economic cannibalism, as well as the relationship between the Firm and the family, that is, trade and art. By outlining the economic evolutionary thread of the family – from the gurbet/peddler trade measure to the corporate form of private property – the paper equally examines the relevant causes of family’s downfall from the ideological and economic point of view. They concern changes in terms of understanding the concept of ownership, manifestations of trade ability and developing a blind, perverted dependence on profit relations. It is precisely this dependence that points to the reversibility of the Simeon’s materialistic nature, to the fact that Njago/Njegovani lived from the property and for it, but that they were destroyed by it and by the phantasmagoric enchantment of earning. Research attention also examines the writer’s treatment of the computational/rationalist worldview whose radicalization and its disastrously reductive and dehumanizing effects are manifested in the examples of Leonid’s abnormal rationality and Gazda Simeon’s vision of economic totalitarianism and the hegemony of the Njegovanʼs Firm (firmocracy).