„Drżąca skóra” — ciało jako medium percepcji świata w prozie Slavenki Drakulić

Abstract

“Trembling skin” — the body as a medium of world perception in Slavenka Drakulić’s prose

The literary productivity of Slavenka Drakulić is an inseparable part of Croatian discourse of women’s writings. The essential element of this prose is the perception of woman’s body from her own, womanly perspective. Suffering, pain, difficult love, wounds of life create a chain of motifs in many of her novels. Behind metaphorically evoked here “trembling skin” there are hidden not only the obsession of discussing human intimacy perceived and expressed by the body but also the writer’s predilection for describing pain, illness, touching sensitive issues of complicated human relations, such as conflict with the father, a rivalry between a mother and a daughter for the same man or a desire to possess another person that leads to cannibalism. The “somatic” prose of Drakulić certainly has many aspects, ranging from perversion and suppressing taboo in literature to woman’s perception of her environment and her own experiences. Moreover, her prose is a cry of a subject imprisoned in the body and lost in the organism of life.