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IVANA TARANENKOVÁ
basis of the canon of Slovak literature, specifically novel writing. Elements
of the fictional world, such as characters and the setting, were categorized
depending on their allegiance to the national element, that is, "selfhood", and
plots were driven by the need to extend this "selfhood", predestined as it was to
overcome antagonistic phenomena represented by the “Other”. Similarly, the
need to preserve the homogeneity of “selfhood” was asserted by eliminating
all centrifugal forces and differentiating phenomena. However, the evolution
of national elements was not based on an objective representation of the world
being portrayed. Rather, it asserted itself as an effect of covert phenomena.
These works of fiction anticipated a state of affairs they regarded as desirable,
employing the genres and forms of social utopia. In the context of Slovak
culture of this period these literary texts thus represented not only a product
of the national culture that asserted its identity, but also helped to bring
this about by envisaging a world they aspired to in real life. The genres most
suited to this model of fiction were the romance" and Bildungsroman: love
stories in which one of the protagonists, who stood for the national principle,
would initiate the national awakening of his or her partner, who had become
temporarily alienated from it. The protagonists’ union subsequently aimed at
the establishment, or renewal, of national life. The harsh juxtaposition that
dominates the basic narrative in this model of fiction resulted, in its turn,
in melodrama becoming the key form of literary representation, constantly
stressing manifestations of good and evil, dominated by powerful emotions
and resulting in highly schematic works of literature.”
The rejection of modernity and the modern can thus be observed within
nineteenth-century Slovak national literature both in terms of ideology, as
individualisation and disintegration of a cohesive model of the world threatened
1! I base this view on the definition of romance developed by Northrop Frye, whose works,
Anatomy of Criticism and The Secular Scripture, define it as a type of fiction in which the
protagonist, who is superior to his environment, performs extraordinary acts. At the same
time, Frye defines romance as having a “generic plot”: a genre narrative with an archetypal
story projecting the ideal of an ideal society. In terms of nineteenth-century Slovak literature,
we might thus speak of the nationally oriented elites’ projection of the creation of a modern
national culture.
In his book The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode
of Excess, Peter Brooks regards the melodramatic representation regime as an expression of
imagination characteristic of literature in the “post-sacral age”, that is, in modern literature
of the age of the bourgeois revolutions. He locates its beginnings in Romantic literature
and also in authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, Charles Dickens and Fyodor
Dostoevsky: “I remain largely convinced by my own arguments: that melodrama is a form
for the post-sacred era, in which polarization and hyperdramatization of forces in conflict
represent a need to locate and make evident, legible, and operative those large choices of
ways of being which we hold to be of overwhelming importance even though we cannot
derive them from any transcendental system of belief.” (Peter Brooks: The Melodramatic
Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, New Haven ¬
London, Yale University Press, 1995, viii).
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