RIVERS OF BABYLON – POSTMODERNÝ BILDUNGSROMAN, ROMÁN KONCA DEJÍN

The paper interprets the novel Rivers of Babylon (1991) by Peter Pišťanek in the context of the postmodernism analysis by Frederick Jameson and the statements on the End of History by F. Fukuyama. It does not reconstruct only the reception of the novel but also the period discussions about the stratification of the genres of contemporary Slovak prose, which was conditioned by challenging historicity as well as historical awareness. The novel by P. Pišťanek is characterized here as a text which in the context of period Slovak literature manifested the attributes of postmodernism in the way they were defined by F. Jameson in his book Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) – these include „historical deafness“, „depthlessness“, „waning of effect“, as well as postmodern irony created in the form of pastiche. At the same time it also thematizes the situation of Slovak society at the moment of the political transformation when the structures of the old system are collapsing and a new one is being established. This is the moment which defines the modification of the genre structures of the novel which control the central syuzhet line of the novel linked to the protagonist, Rácz. Pišťanek´s text can be regarded as a travesty of Bildungsroman, based on a story of integrating in society, on accepting the state of the world. In this case the integration of the protagonist takes place in the era of „End of History“, the loss of trustworthiness of any norms. In the novel there are parallels in Fukuyama´s reflections on society after the End of History, especially in those points that do not sound so triumphant or optimistic as their fundamental proposition, saying that what will stir the social process is the struggle for recognition. In these moments the central theme of the novel can be interpreted in the context of Hegel´s master-slave dialectic.