The City on the Border and Borders of the City

Abstract

In the relevant poems of Milan Milišić analyzed in this paper the city is not necessarily a topos. It is, first of all, a microcosm with three parameters important for identifying its metaphysical dimension – intellectuality, sensuality, and ontological sorrow. Therefore, while singing about a specific city, Dubrovnik, Milišić also sings on the universal City. What is more, singing about a city, Milišić interprets the city by placing its microcosm in a certain context and thus limiting it. However, for any empirical feature of the city to be understood, interpreted, and poetically presented to the reader, it is necessary to identify and mark its determining and descriptive codes. When it comes to Milišić’s poetry, the determinants are the notions that determine the key points of the city and thus locate the signs of life in it. These determinants are then closer defined by descriptors – words and phrases which interpret them and thus determine the city as a macro-determinant. Therefore seemingly incoherent elements – bits and pieces, unconnected and scattered – in Milišić’s verses appear to be connective tissues which on the micro-level, at least temporarily – and admittedly, sometimes only ostensibly – provide the whole picture of the urbification field. It seems that the interpretative model can also follow these formal units in this manner, by examining the meanings of each of them, we can reach the core of the poetic image of the city. The most significant determinant of the city in Milišić’s poetry turns out to be the border. Milišić’s lyric narrative of the border moves between the traditional and personal (emotional). His poetic contemplation in all of the analyzed poems is founded on identifying the crack as a basic descriptor of the border, as a sign of instability, but also as a diversifying line between two spatially and temporarily neighboring and yet separate worlds. In cultural terms, each border is a sign of partialness and in this sense, it is also a symbol of two experiences, two essences. If the constituting elements of a city are themselves cracked, separated, divided, bordering, then it is not only a city on a border (which has been a several-century-long historical, but also the sociological reality of Dubrovnik), but the city itself is border-structured. Thus, quite naturally and inexorably, the “spent city” is reduced to a line. This line almost ontologically cancels all the varieties and manifoldness lying in the foundations of the city as a natural and cultural area.