Milen Ruskov's "Lost in Nature" (2008, Janet 45), plays postmodernly with his reader, seemingly hiding his peculiarities behind the monologue as narrative form: quotations and quotations parodies, ideological polyphony, synthetics, irony, fragmentation, etc.
In the conditionality of the text games, the work is repeatedly and ambiguously self-titled and self-defined as a work of medicine - the work is the work of the Portuguese Guimaraes da Silva, the dating of the study is attached to the end of the XVI century. recalls notes from the near and far travels of a doctor during his training. On the one hand, the author of the exhibition - Guimaraes - is the protagonist of the novel, his own work, the biography of a study, with the center of Seville (port axis inclined to the New World, to the Great Geographical Discoveries, to changes in socio-economic relationships, etc.).
He not only records his observations, reflections, ideas, thoughts, but also constantly cares for his reader, stops the flow of the story, clarifies, clarifies with special attention to the facts, with respect to their sequence, thus avoiding excessive fragmentation and fragmentation. the stories are solved in a novel plot. On the other hand, the plot constantly pays attention to the Guimaraes teacher - Dr. Monardes, but also to unimportant details about everyday situations, experiences and events that are not always directly relevant to science and science. In “Discarded in Nature,” at the same time, the self-narrative implies the narrator's insatiable attachment to the plot, but also problematizes the role-playing nature of the author's embedded figure and the volumes of her fictional presence.
A whole network of hidden and explicit quotations was driven through the Guimaraes. At first glance, random, different (by type, meaning and direction) quotations in the novel, repeated quotations that also function as leitmotifs, specific and unspecified by reference to literary and non-literary figures and biographies, geographical and culturally marked toponymy, renaissance studies, discoveries, concepts, references to artistic and non-fiction texts are not so much as implanted snippets and references, but as absorbed narrative tissue, as meaningfully loaded flesh from the body of a novel a.
E.g. The folk wisdom of Dr. Monardes's book gradually emerged from its role as references to the Renaissance in its Bulgarian dimensions, references to the Petko-Slaveikov activity (a collector of proverbs and sayings) and became part of speech, from the active vocabulary of novel characters. Although the action unfolds through the Renaissance, in the west, in Spain, in England, beyond the chronotype and beyond the plot in a historical ditch, there remains one side of the narrative - a side of the image that directly relates to the Bulgarian past and present, which in the unexpected ironic and unobtrusive, it reminds the native reader not of the foreign and the need for his perception, but of the cultural precipitations, the present-day spaces of tradition and traditional.
The irony is not only transferred in the direction of the reader and his knowledge and perceptions. He laughs at any excessive attempt by characters to express their own and other's philosophical judgments, to be "scholastics." Guimaraes scoffs at Plato and Socrates and will explain the world to himself, transform himself into a cartoon, sink into ridicule without realizing it. The narrator seeks to iron out the complicated perception of being with details such as: "And the cunning have rightly invented so many things to make the world look complicated." (P. 225) Then he will contradict himself, change his position when defending the idea. that the public system is complex. And Dr. Monardes also teaches on matters such as the public, far from his so-called scientific pursuits, influences Aristotle's covenants and explains them to his student.
Gradually Guimaraes comes to the confession: "I had the feeling, as I say that a person inside is listening to me and making fun of me, it is just bursting with laughter." (P. 268) The split in his conscious aspects is transformed into: "That person inside me he laughed, and I laughed at him. "(p. 271) The irony goes beyond the contours of the inner world of heroes. She also expresses herself in the scientific work of Dr. Monardes. The teacher's book will be called by a maid - a libel or "a small book, usually unsigned and full of slander against someone told as funny as possible." (p. 274) In lateral view, research is also ridiculed. The irony thins through dialogue, seeps into the words, into the thoughts of the characters, breaks through their roles, through the social and personal, breaks into their actions, gets lost in order to swell again and go through the thematic strands of the novel.
One of the themes that constantly engage the characters grows through the versatility of their manifestations in the leading theme of the novel: the theme of man and man in general, the desires of the spirit, the natural ambivalence, the spirit and the body, the explanatory and the inexplicable.
Dr. Monardes will firmly conclude for the inexplicable that he does not exist despite his contact with him. Guimaraes will try to argue that things cannot be so simple, but he will deny himself and deny the mysterious and the mystical. (It should be noted that "Lost in Nature" remembers "Pocket Encyclopedia of the Mysteries"Even though in translation, there is a symptomatic distance in the memory entry.)
The inexplicable questions that humanity has been considering, since the human species has existed, in "Discarded in Nature" are being played in a different direction. The spiritual is confronted by the natural - the body. It is no coincidence that Rabelais appears in the novel as a name-sign - yet it is precisely the artistic overexposure of the time in which the French author lived and created, or rather, the time in which his greats live, the freedom they profess.
The stories that Guimaraes records, the diseases he seems to cure, along with his teacher, are largely devoted to the biological and physiological dimensions of the human, the corporeal, and more precisely, the corporeal lobe with its ever-literarily consumed characteristics.
Tobacco treatment by Renaissance doctors is accompanied by events where the funny and the tragic look at each other. The treatment brings to the fore the laughter of the absurdity of the situations, but there are hints of tragedy in the characters of Milen Ruskov, because in their striving to promote tobacco as a universal medicine, to save the body, they deny the human right to be more than flesh, which will decompose, forcing the reader to think about the non-corporeal as well.
In his speech to the King of England, in defense of tobacco, Dr. Monardes will conclude: "You can easily recognize the really powerful things by neither giving explanations nor allowing them, but simply acting in a certain way whose properties we can just register, and nothing more. This is precisely what our life-saving science expresses. "(P. 180)
The game does not end with the transformations of the inexplicable. Tobacco saves lives - brings a person back from death. In one of the chapters of the novel, without any explanation, the dead man is resurrected. In the game plan, the reader is not misled, but is encouraged to reflect on the belief in two of its hypostases, realized through two adjacent worldviews, reduced to: faith in God and faith in science. Science, knowledge is the god of the main characters. Skeptical of everything else, Dr. Monardes will refute any encounter with the mysterious as possible. But the novel does not preach, but points to the contradictory conclusions reached by the characters, their carnival life transformations and incarnations.
The carnival springs from the essence of the characters. The disguise of Jesus (the driver of Dr. Monardes) will seemingly change his nature. Dressed in red, he will learn how to dance flamenco and dance it, because clothes guide and choose the role to play. Choosing to become a veterinarian, realizing the financial benefits of his new occupation, Guimaraes begins to practice. Despite his short-term practice, he thinks of himself as a veterinarian.
In "Discarded in Nature" at the storyline level, characters recognize each other through life's transformations, acquiring social status as a role-bound environment in which they live transforms their existence into a mask appropriate to the situation.
Guimaraes and his teacher do not perceive themselves as charlatans, but in relation to other doctors and their scientific research, they say: "Vallejo is a strange doctor, rather a charlatan who travels from city to city and from nobleman to nobleman in the hope of finding someone to give him money to develop his vaccine. (with 240) On the idea of the so-called. charlatan is stepping into modern medicine. Dr. Monardes's thesis about the nonviolence of treating plague with plague, cholera with cholera, the idea that the drug is measured by the dose of poison, is at the heart of the pharmacy from its embryo to this day. The encounter with a different-minded scholar in the novel leads to a parody of ignorance and the inability of man to look at himself in the other, to know his own quackery, his own self. The characters are captivated by their understandings, their relentlessness, their carnival, their theatricality.
And in the narrative, doctors are also present in productions that, despite their lack of connection with medicine, are widely transmitted. The presence of the characters in the theater room in itself suggests their playful nature, the playable substance of the novel. During the performances, the tobacco doctors imitate the actions of the rest of the audience. But the double-roll comes with Guimaraes, who thinks of Shakespeare's tragedies as comedies, though others in the theater react rather with impartiality and indifference to the action of the stage, and do not stop commenting, trying to control it, and to be included in it (which again brings us back to the Bulgarian Revival reality) until the border between actors and viewers blurs to the point that it ceases to function.
The novel itself explicates its poetics and wants it to be announced and illustrated with examples, challenging the reader. And in addition to the theater, the characters find themselves in prison - they meet Cervantes, with whom Dr. Monardes makes "ambiguous jokes" (p. 253). In what the novelist Cervantes says, which Guimaraes wants to point out that he has memorized, lies the logic through which the narrative splits: "Even if Christ himself now descended to earth again, you would never believe it" (p. 253)
Cervantes promises to dedicate his next work to Monardes. And in the teacher's dialogue with the student there is a hint of the possibility of both being heroes of the Spanish prose writer. Apart from their direct explication in the plot, at the level of the narrative play, they can also be recognized as Cervantes characters. They themselves want to be retold, likened to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
But Guimaraes will also reverse the idea of an internally laid model of the couple with his thoughts on nature, a vault to the title and to the whole chain of internal accumulations, which goes back to the beginning of the novel, to his name. The student will come up with the idea: “ха they invented the spirit, the soul, the books, the faith, the philosophy - so that it seems that there is another direction, that there is a way through the fence, through the narrow door of the elect, that they can escape, break away, to be free. But it can not. No, he can't. Nature is your master and completely owns you. Only here and there, like small islands in the ocean, are there perhaps things that are truly yours, not hers. Maybe there is, and maybe not. ”(Pp. 280 - 281)
The characters of the novel are lost in the nature of the world and in the world of nature. And the reader is left to play their roles, to finish their works, to laugh, but also to think, to think for a long time… he is left alone to unravel the meaning of his own existence…
