“We are all constructors”. Milorad Pavić’s Zapis u znaku device as epiphanic retro-(post-) modernism

Abstract

Summary Milorad Pavić’s An Inscription in the Sign of the Virgin (1973) has not been the subject of scholarly investigation yet, although this story manifests a peculiar poetics of epiphany which aims to counter Yugoslavian (post-)modernity immanently by using its own hybrid and fragmented strategies and to restore an allegedly lost totality and transcendentality by focusing on a mythological past. The text is structured as a postmodern play with language and literary conventions; but its ontological, phenomenological, linguistic and geopoetic implications carry a conservative character. Every movement the text makes towards fragmentation is followed by an opposite movement towards a restoration of traditional structures. For these reasons, I propose to label this poetics of epiphany as ‘retro-(post-)modernism’. In this article, I will focus on the mentioned issues by illustrating these opposite movements with the help of the philosophical concepts of Jean-Luc Marion, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.