The Function of Dreams in Borislav Pekićʼs “The Golden Fleece” [Zlatno runo]

Abstract

Relying on the analytical-interpretative approach, the paper tries to illuminate the semantics of the rich oneiric material in Pekić’s The Golden Fleece [Zlatno runo], especially the multiplicity of functions that it performs. In addition to the presence of various manifestations of the oneiric phenomenon (dreams, daydreaming, lucid dreams, ecstatic and/or hallucinatory dreams and pre-death apparitions), the paper also brings to the fore the multiple roles that the oneiric experience of Njegovan family members and their mythical ancestor Noemis in The Golden Fleece perform (e.g., the prophetic, archetypal, hereditary, characterological, psychological, compensatory, anthropological, religious (mysterious), ontological and finally epistemological role, as well as performing the function of de-automatization). The attention paid to the implicit poetics of dreams shaped in this way is equally split between the interpretation of explicit novelistic reflections on the nature and role of the oneiric experience. It is precisely these reflections – along with some other elements of the septology, such as the archetypically motivated liminal status of the hero, the conception of time, the treatment of historical material or the poetics of the subtitle – that testify to the programmatic principle of The Golden Fleece: the creation of the novelistic world as a predominantly spectral, phantasmagorical, oneirically enchanted temporal-spatial duration of the hero.