Laughter Catalogues and Discourse Trans-Correctness in the Fiction of Sava Damjanov

Abstract

Numerous provocative questions that Sava Damjanov directs at Serbian culture are problematized in the text with the examination of the use of the laughter cataloging practice. This practice has both a technical and a metaphysical aspect, which is covered by the introductory part of the text. It has been observed that the intertextual connection, established through this practice with Serbian and world literary heritage, is particularly conspicuous in relation to the oeuvre of James Joyce: the Irish writer employed the cataloging practice profoundly, especially in Ulysses. In this intertextual dialogue, there is a pronounced similarity in the use of the figure of blasphemy, which could lead us to attempt to read what is achieved with the practice of laughter cataloging on the content plane, i.e. what is its general socio-cultural meaning. The answer would be that through experimenting with the corporeality as well as sexuality of the text, the Serbian author reaches discourse trans-correctness. Relying on Roland Barthes and his interpretation of Marquis de Sade’s work, this served to detect the “truth” of Sava Damjanov’s text, that truth which other theorists interpreted as the expression of the postmodernist principle ars combinatorial. The naked body of the text of Sava Damjanov – which contains no politically nor poetically correct worldviews – re-examines all stereotypes, even those formed through the socio-theoretical re-examination of stereotypes.