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| UDK 159.964.2 COBISS.SR-ID 16470537 |
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Case report Incestuous motives in Bora Stankovic's opus Mirjana Stojkovic- Ivkovic ZZZZ RADNIKA “ZELEZNICE SRBIJE “, BEOGRAD |
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| Download in pdf format | MITKA (to Koštana): And now
tell me that: How tuberculousis happened In Kumanovo town when crazy
and furious Stojan startet looking at Stamena, his uncle's daughter
so that he wanted to burn the town or to take Stamena for a wife.
And churches were closed for three days and the downtown was closed
too. Stamena cries and begs: Stojan, listen, Stojan, have it ever heard or seen brother to take his sister for a wife? And him, abandoned and furious Stojan replays: Stamena, listen, Stamena, Stamena, bunch of spring flowers Stamena, grain of pearl have you ever heard or seen; small stones have no number deep water has no bottom tall tree has no shade Beautiful woman, listen, has no relatives Summary:
This work is inspired by the theme of incestuous motives in Bora
Stanković's opus. Incest implies a sexual contact between close
relatives belonging to the same family (father-daughter,mother-son,
brother-sister, father-son, and so on) or actions leading to that
act. Incestuous acts or intentions occur stealthily and the causes
of incest come from the perpetrator`s personality and the
environment in which this personality developed and the conditions
in which he or she lives. The method of work - we covered the
material from “Koštana “, ‘’Nečista krv (Impure blood)”, “Jovča”.
“Aunt-Zlata’’ along with biographical information about the writer
himself. At the same time while Freud was explaining the unconscious
psyche, incest, the Oedipal complex, dreams, etc., Bora Stanković
was looking for answers for the breakup of his family and the
reasons for an increasing number of the mentally ill members in the
family. While writing, he came to the conclusion that incest, that
is impure blood is to blame for it. From incestuous relationships
they had children in whose veins impure blood flowed. This impure
blood was the reason for various physical and mental diseases. Freud
and Bora Stanković were trying to present sexuality and passion as
the driving force that has to be controlled that is, one should not
allow the violation of the oldest prohibitions (incest). The
consequences of incest are devastating both for the person and the
family, for posterity and even for all mankind. |
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| INTRODUCTION Every civilization begins and is based on giving up instincts and every culture on internalization of external prohibitions. [1] Perhaps everything started from incest and its prohibition, thus from the secret of sexual instinct, in wider sense Eros. It is highly likely that incestuous gratification of sexual needs of men in the past would lead to a blind alley in man's development. This separated man from other lower beings in nature. The first moral codex of humanity was the prohibition of incest. [2] One question arises: was this prohibition respected and put into effect everywhere? Even nowadays incest hasn't disappeared, we face this demon, in fact, in a hidden and disguised form (hidden motive). Freud explains incest trough the Oedipus complex, considering that it comes out as an obstacle to the impulse for reunion with mother. We know that the first choice of a sexual object for a boyis inscestuous, focused on his mother (forbidden object). Oedipus complex depends both on the child and on mother's affecting maturity.[3] In order to better understand what happens and how it came to the motif of incest in Bora Stanković' opus, we must reconsider the notion-development of personality. There's no sexual instinct among children in the form that emerges in adolescence which manifests with irresistible attraction happening between two people: their aim is sexual act or at least acts leading to it. [4] The instinct in a man is an extraordinary driving power made freely available to him however, the instict is not and cannot be something separated from the other parts of his personality. The personality determines the fate of the instinct. Animals are periodically sexual but man is always sexual. The sexual life of an animal is regulated by reflexes and instincts and men's sexual life is regulated by his reason, as well. This is the essential difference which enables man to do with his available instinct energy as he pleases.[5] If parent's tenderness towards a child helped to awake child's sexual instinct before the onset of physical conditions and adolescence to such an extent that mental arousal evidently reached the genital system, then this tenderness can achieve its task, namely to see the child in the time of maturity when choosing his/her sexual object. A child would certainly choose for a sexual object the people closest to him/her that he/she has loved since childhood with his/her subdued libido. Delaying sexual maturity gains time to set boundaries for incest.[6] PRESENTATION OF WORK The incestuous motif presented in Bora Stanković’s opus is not only characteristic for the environment described by the author but actually presents a universal problem of a man. Some biographers opine that it was the author`s struggle against some dark atavism of his own nature, widely based on his subconsciousness. Although all the causes and consequences of forbidden love in Bora Stankovic’s opus are clear and visible, however it would be one-sidedly interpreted if we didn’t try to find out their sources in the author`s life, in his instinctuous nature, in his sanguine temperament and his impure origin. The patriarchal rules imposed from outside couldn`t change human nature however they gave their contribution so that the sin emerged where perhaps it wasn`t expected to: among servants, foreigners and relatives. Hence, we find pathological perversity and appearance of impure, incestuous love among Stankovic’s characters. [7] Sexual deviation in kinship relations is found in many places in Bora`s opus. And as Shakespeare speaks through Hamlet, , so does Bora Stanković through Mitke, . When Mitke asks Koštana to sing the song where Stojan wants to take his own sister Stamena to be his wife, one can wonder: are they Bora`s own wishes? Considering that this is a folk song, it was sung in taverns, oredered to be sung, sometimes, we can make a conclusion that people accepted it in spite of its describing an incestuous love. Bora Stanković started relatively early to sublimate Eros by writing shorts stories and later dramas. [8] This deviation is also present in the work’’Aunt Zlata“ who is smelling her son`s head and when that smell reminds her of her late husband, ‘’it would start with her power trembling and soul dying, being unable to stand it any more and not being allowed to kiss him, she would only press her trembling lips on his head. « Covert incest“ is when a child becomes the object of parental preoccupation, love and passion. Those parents in hronically problematic marriage or partnership, make a surogat partner from their child. The line between healthy and incestuous parental love is crossed when the relation with a child has the purpose of satisfying parental but not child`s needs. As the marriage gets worse, the child becomes the object manipulated by the parent and used for avoiding pain and reality of a problematic marriage. Father`s erotic affection towards his daughter was described in the novel “Jovča“. Jovča is delaying and stalling Naza`s marriage because his love for her is so big and cannot be hidden. In boss Jovcha`s personality, we can find the portrait of a patriarchal despot, an inaccessible man, furious, of changeable mood and behaviour. An unusual love for his daughter started in his heart. Mysterious dark love confronts pathology. Boss Jovcha wanted to isolate Naza from society so that he himself could enjoy her beauty and her company. Jovcha, when he comes home at night, as if rendered unconscious by the force of longing and lust, makes his wife take off her clothes and dance naked. Naza, having a relationship with a servant, lives out of town with peasants; Jovcha took it as a huge mental stroke which led to his mental derangement. Obsessive thoughts about Naza led to degradation of his personality, to insanity.[9] Sofka (the character from “Impure blood“ grew up in afamily of social outcasts, she didn`t have friends in her social environment so that she wasn`t able to develop the object of her libido. It caused the augmentation of her narcissism and the strenghtening of incestuous relationships. Unrealized love with parents is most fatal for a child as the conditions to live out and overcome such a relationship do not exist. Effendi Mita felt and knew well the magic of money in a poverty-stricken class society and all the misery when you are left without it. He didn’t have any other loves nor fear. Sofka, seeing her father poor, stopped idealising and loving him. As soon as her father-ideal was shatterred, she was ready to realize her love. Two times, she was standing at the edge of love but both times love had incestuous character and none was realized. The first love with her father- in -law, the man who had the role of her father. The second was also incestuous, however, that time Sofka had the role of a mother raising the child who was supposed to become – a husband. We can understand Efendi Mita’s pathologic selfishness like father’s incestuous jelousy of his daughter achieving happiness without him. [11] By delaying sexual maturity, one can gain some time, apart from other sexual obstacles, to set the boundaries for incest and accept the moral rules which strictly exclude the choice of loved people from one’s childhood as sexual objects. Respecting these obstacles is, first of all, a cultural demand of society which must stop wasting interest by a family needed for reaching higher social units. Early maturity or early involvment in sexual relations makes it difficult later to expect the control of sexual instinct using higher mental instances. It strengthens a violent character. An occurrence of sensual lust and incestuous desires in Stankovic`s characters cannot be explained either with some special southern temperament and mentality or with some oriental influences on the relationship between a man and a woman nor with a sexual deviation. All of this is conditioned by difficult patriarchal morality which took every love for a sin. Reason should be sought in the characters, their development in the family and the environment. Bora`s characters are narcissistic and emotionally unstable and depressive. They protect themselves from emotions by withdrawal, isolation and negation. His marriages are not gardens where they raise children but arenas full of violence and hate. Analyzing mother characters, the author describes them as possessive, controlling and pushing and fathers as cold, aggressive boems with no feelings. The mothers built strong symbiotic and possessive relations with their sons which, in an environment of changed moral values, with an inadequate father, already prepared a pathological base for incest. Very often in Bora`s works his characters (with covert or realized incest) in order to function (to protect their Ego and reduce aggressiveness), have to suppress their unpleasant memories and conflicting thoughts to protect themselves from worrisome and painful emotions.[10] DISCUSSION Sexuality is the basis and moving force of of how we experience the world. It is the place where the conflict between certain individual specificities and collective norms of societybecomes inevitable. Whenever traumas occur which reach into the domains of sexuality, and such is the trauma of incest, covert or realized, then sexuality is a realm between moral norms and desires, behavior and fantasies. The primordial sin, impossibility of realizing our own intrapsychological conflicts, the feeling of guilt, anxiety and depression initiatethe self destructive impulses and latent suicidality in order to destroy this body which is the carrier of dangerous sexuality. In this way we can explain alcoholism, masochism or sadism and also the latent suicidality in the characters of Sofka, Jovča, Mitke,... Bora`s works are an effort to penetrate the dark side of unconscious human psyche, actually the state of a primitive man. On the example from the real life there arise elementary emotions of fear, love, hate, pain, feeling of guilt. His strong instinct uncovered the unconscious part of psyche as well as collective unconscious in an indirect way through life stories. Guided by an instinct, he managed to perceive contradictions of life, he guessed diagnosis of mentaly ill people because he knew thehuman psyche very well. The author wanted to find elements of humanity and he found raw nature, complexes, aggressiveness, contradicton and other dark sides of personality. We have eternal fight of good and evil in our personality, especially in the unconscious part of psyche. Our conscious is here not to allow dark demons to prevail. And finally I`ll cite Milan Bogdanovic”the whole Bora`s opus is a desperate song about unsatisfied passion”. That is a song about everlasting interior struggle between a pure love impulse and uncontrolled instincts. REFERENCES:
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Corresponding Address: Mirjana Stojković- Ivković, ZZZZ radnika “Zeleznice Srbije “, Savska 23, Beograd E-mail: mirivkovic@gmail.com |
Paper received: 8.1.2020 Paper Internet issues: 30.6.2020 |
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