Dedinac’s Woman or the Feminine Dedinac: On the Representation of the Feminine in the Poetry of Milan Dedinac

Abstract

In this paper, we have attempted to show in what way one can speak about the representation of the feminine in the poetry of Milan Dedinac, and how it turns out that this very question is of constitutive importance for the construction of his lyrical discourse. When Raaberg lists the problematic concepts in the Surrealist treatment of woman that led to Surrealists being judged for misogyny, she names almost everything we can also recognize in the poetry of Milan Dedinac: from the woman who represents the “idealized Other”, to the woman who is an “object for the projection of unresolved anxieties”, to her identification with “traditional concepts of the body, irrationality, and nature” (Raaberg). Likewise, the Surrealist conception of passion was also labeled misogynistic, as it presupposes male activity and female passivity – that is, the male subject’s drive to achieve his own transformation through the female object, which further “intensified the subject–object split that Surrealism was supposed to overcome” (Ibid.). Regardless all these listed aspects, what still prevents us from fully believing in the misogynistic character of Dedinac’s poetry? One reason is that Dedinac transparently stripped the male subject of power. There is no male superiority here, and more importantly, there is no escape at the moment when the lyrical subject becomes aware of the danger that a woman’s closeness may bring. Moreover, his entire poetic work is sung in two voices and, in its logic, follows Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of internal dialogism, on which Susan Suleiman also relies when examining the possibilities for hearing a female voice within Surrealist (male) art, in which the woman is most often an object. Finally, another reason why we do not see the misogyny commonly attributed to the Surrealists in the case of Milan Dedinac may be found in the ways he equates poetry with woman.