Between Confession and Subversion: Ideology, Eroticism, and Laughter in Levitan by Vitomil Zupan

Abstract

This article analyzes Vitomil Zupan’s novel Levitan as a politically subversive and hybrid narrative that interrogates totalitarian ideology through grotesque aesthetics, erotic vitalism, and confessional narration. This analysis draws upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque function of laughter, emphasizing how Zupan utilizes subversive narrative strategies to deconstruct official political discourse. The grotesque and erotic vitalism function as subversive narrative strategies that confront the symbolic authority of Titoist socialism. The prison setting and ideological representation in Levitan is interpreted through the lenses of Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power and surveillance, Louis Althusser’s concept of ideological state apparatuses, and Fredric Jameson’s understanding of the political unconscious. Furthermore, Vladimir Biti’s concept of the “ideology of originality” provides a theoretical framework for understanding the question of whether Jakob Levitan’s narrative autonomy becomes complicit in the very ideological mechanisms it seeks to resist. Within this framework, Levitan emerges as a complex literary artifact that resists ideological representation of reality through a synthesis of confessional introspection, grotesque aesthetic, and narrative innovation.