QUESTIONING THE ANTI-FAIRY TALE USING EXAMPLES FROM BOSNIAC ORAL AND WRITTEN LITERATURE

Abstract

Since the entry of postmodern literature into the literary discourse, like other prose genres, fairy tales have opened up to experimentation, from the expansion of the thematic-motive structure, the transformation of motifs to the complete destruction of the genre's fundamental determinants. In accordance with postmodern tendencies, the fairy tale also reached a stage in which it denies its own organization and testifies to the developmental path of self-contradiction. Like anti-drama or the destruction of the epic form in associative prose, the anti-fairy tale also appears. Anti-fairy tales are narratives in which the authors turn the image of the fairy tale
world into a sinister, evil or infernal one, and frequent motifs are death and the transience of life. From the antifairytale emanates a sense of existential threat, fear and hopelessness, and the characters are most often faced with situations from which there is no way out. Guilt, unfortunate fate or an unfortunate set of circumstances lead the heroes to their sudden end. And precisely in the ending, Jolles (1978) finds the basic difference between a fairy tale and an anti-fairy tale – the former ends happily, and the latter has a tragic ending. Examples of anti-fairytale narratives can also be found in Hans Christian Andersen's prose The Little Mermaid, The Girl with the Matches and The Lead Soldier. In contemporary literature, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter are just some of the authors who
have revised the fairy tale world, playing with the genre in a postmodernist way. It is not possible to understand the texts of these authors without the correlation with the fairy tale from the oral tradition, from which they take the plot patterns, themes, motifs and characters. The term anti-fairy tale is not common in contemporary science of literature, because such narratives are usually classified into different literary types: parables, fantastic stories, satires... Awareness of the passing of time and the fear of aging is a dominant feature of contemporary culture, and these themes are introduced into the author's fairy tale most often in the form of an allegorical story. Despite this, we can recognize anti-fairytales as a genre from oral tradition to contemporary literature and examples from the Bosniac literary tradition. Using a comparative method and the method of working on the text, the paper analyzes and interprets the sayings that belong to Bosniak oral literature. These are stories in which oral tradition punishes the hero for certain actions and which have an unhappy ending. What is significant is that in the examples of anti-fairy tale, unlike fairy tale, the educational dimension dominates over the entertaining. Then, using the example of the collection Tales from the Mysterious Forest by the contemporary Bosniac author Rizo Džafić, the characteristics of anti-fairy tale narratives are questioned. The archetypal motifs of the fairy tale were inverted by Džafić, so instead of an optimistic ending that implies that the hero succeeds in achieving a happy life after obstacles and difficulties, an ominous picture of the world and a tragic ending are offered. The final part of each of the above-mentioned stories
ends with a feeling of hopelessness, and the heroes of these stories are unhappy in the realization of love, struggle with existential questions, face the condemnation of the environment and all of them end tragically. This work aims to contribute to a better understanding of the meanings contained in examples of anti-fairytale in Bosniac oral and written literature.