Radosvet Kolarov

The article considers the presence of the motif of death in the early and late poetical works of Stoyan Mihaylovski. Outlined as the main core facets of this motif, consistent in all of his works, are the general feeling of deadness associated with the death of ideals and grounds for social action in the world, and also with the perishing of all hope for the betterment of the human race; the universal scale of this calamity and the unsatisfying reasoning for “triumphant” evil in world history. The aforementioned aspects of the motif are viewed within the framework of a limited in scope whole, comprising the cycles “Doloroso” and “Varia”, from the most representative collection of Mihaylovski’s selected works to date – “Divine Rebel”, published in 1987. This makes it possible for two main and in many respects mutually exclusive world outlooks to collide and stand out, closely connected to the death motif, but oriented towards different horizons of meaning. The first one, stronger in the early Mihaylovski is the linear horizon fully contained in earthly human History with no way “upwards”, no way beyond. The second one, characteristic of the late Mihaylovski does not completely negate the first one, but integrates in itself the vertical transcendent dimension of being as well. The sonnet “Lama Sabahtani!” is seen as a key poetical work, marking the transition between the two. In the second part of the article, the death motif is viewed in a different interpretative context from the one in “Divine Rebel”. The analysis is focused on poems from another collection representative of Mihaylovski’s works, published in his lifetime and with his active participation – “Collected Works. Volume I”. The aim is to show the transformation in the death motif, using the autotextuality terms work of initiation, enhancing work and explicating work.

This article offers a speculative, autotextual reading of J. G. Ballard’s oeuvre through the lens of psychoanalysis and the theoretical framework of Radosvet Kolarov. It seeks to develop the concept of “auto-catastrophe” – a traumatic event that marks a radical turning point in an author’s creative output. The study conceptualizes this auto-catastrophe as a “transmodal cut” that (dis)connects various techniques, motifs, media, corpora, etc. The text also proposes a reading of Kolarov’s notion of “discursive desire,” interpreted through Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of enjoyment [jouissance].
The article applies these concepts in an analysis of Ballard’s most experimental work, The Atrocity Exhibition, emphasizing its intermedial aspects in order to demonstrate how the transgressive nature of the transmodal cut enables literature to cross its own formal boundaries. The text also explores how the auto-catastrophe can (dis)connect the works and enjoyments of different authors who share the same trauma. To this end, it briefly examines the relationship between the works of Ballard and those of the American writer William Burroughs.