Postsocialist and Gothic Elements in the novel Cathedral by Ivo Brešan

This paper analyses the Gothic elements in the novel Cathedral (2007) by Ivo Brešan. The frame story, which thematises the narrator’s life and the Croatian War of Independence in the 1990s, is intertwined with the story he writes about St. James Cathedral in Šibenik. After he was forced to leave the University of Zagreb due to his communist past, he worked in the museum of Šibenik, where he translated Latin historical documents. He appreciated the originality of past geniuses and despised contemporary spiritual and architectural uniformity. However, in romanticising modern culture, he used the postmodern grotesque profanation of the sacred, the Gothic diabolisation of Petrarchist love and the interpretation of history as a sequence of strange events. The irrationality of the romantic layer is caused by a ghost of an unhappily deceased young woman Klotilda, whose character is a postmodern ironisation of Petrarch’s Laura and is seen by mentally unstable men. In the historical layer, the motif of cannibalism indicates an individual revenge on the Venetian conquerors. The narrator supplements incomplete facts with fantasy, emphasising that even historiographers cannot avoid narration in their “necrophilic” search for the past. Gothic elements are combined with grotesque and carnivalisation and are evident in the portrayal of male characters as symbolic androgines who defy social norms with their female gender traits. In Brešan’s novel, they emphasise the perpetual antithesis of beauty and human perversions in an ethical, grotesque and fantastic dimension. However, the tradition of Gothic novels is ironised at the end, in which the mystery is not resolved, but is created by the narrator’s disappearance in his own story.