Mirko Kovač’s Narrative Alloy (Biography of Malvina Trifković)

Abstract

Mirko Kovač’s short novel Malvina (Biography of Malvina Trifković, 1971) is composed in an indirect, fragmentary sequencing of a variety of forms and kinds of discourses. The textual fragmentation principle is exactly what activates the reader’s engagement in the process of (re)constitution and (re)construction of meaning. Kovač’s poetical principles rise from his commitment to reality, the reader, and the literary text. Since it was first published, Malvina has attracted the attention of a wide professional and non-professional readership, primarily as a narrative about Serbian-Croatian hatred and as the first lesbian novel in the South Slavic world. It was not only the choice of narrative forms but also that of the topic that marks Kovač’s text as open to those forms of social life placed on the margins of society and exposed to repression. Kovač builds up ironic outlines of the codes of socio-cultural milieus and of all the forms of social power, providing a parodic image of social morality based on subversive mechanisms and partial truths. The social, political, ideological, religious, ethic, and aesthetic models of the world through which one perceives reality are established in the absence of emancipated action and choice. Prohibitions and limitations, stereotypes, and taboos, and, on the opposite side, transgression (breaking of boundaries) of all the proscriptions, are the object of redescription in this work.