Trauma and Individuation in Florjan Lipuš’s Novel The Flight of Boštjan

Abstract

In 2003, Florjan Lipuš published the novel The Flight of Boštjan. The story of the novel revolves around an incisive event from the protagonist’s childhood during the Second World War in the Slovenian minority community in Austrian Carinthia: The gendarmerie in the service of the Nazi regime takes the protagonist’s mother from her home and she never returns. The event is presented as a traumatic experience that the child’s perception cannot integrate into consciousness as a memory accessible in a clear and complete account of the event. Only the horror and the child’s inability to understand the meaning of this event, which is fundamental for him, function as a repression within the “mechanism” of trauma. In Lipuš’s novel, the child’s experiences of horror and loss and the gradual healing of the trauma are presented, named and structured in an original and thematically particularly suggestive way: through variable repetitions, especially of a symbolic motif referring to a mythological being called “škopnik” in the Slovenian ethnological tradition (within the framework of Slavic mythology). This article tends to recognize the cognitive power of literature in the literary-narrative structures of the universally human basic experiences of existence. Reading the novel links it in particular to the psychoanalysis of C. G. Jung and his concept of archetypes.