Pekić and Irony

“No Post Office of Truths” – What Pekić’s Irony Demands Today 

In 1968, asked whether irony was the last viable relation to reality—or just an admission of powerlessness—Borislav Pekić replied dryly: “Literature does not build the world. At best, it dissects and examines it.” And further: the writer is no postman, and literature no post office. It does not deliver solutions, it examines premises.
It is a striking refusal to turn art into propaganda. But it is also a call to action—especially for a generation raised on the reflex that every text must “do something”: click, share, sign, resist. Pekić reverses the logic. Literature acts by refusing; it improves by complicating; it intervenes by slowing us down.

 

Hieronymus Bosch’s allegorical chaos illustrates humanity’s futile pursuit of empty promises. The central wagon of hay, dragged to destruction as people scramble for their share, mirrors Pekić’s rejection of literature as “postoffice of solutions.” It reveals the world’s absurdity in hyperbolic, ironic form. The Haywain Triptych (c. 1515), the grotesque procession of delusion, illustrates: Whoever believes the world can be saved through slogans and quick fixes ends up in the train of folly. Pekić’s irony immunizes against such illusions.

Too often today the word “irony” collapses into “cynicism.” But cynicism is the smug “nothing matters.” Irony, by contrast, is precision. It inserts space between statement and assent, between pose and conviction, so that the conditions of agreement come into view. For a meme-thinking generation, the distinction is vital. Cynicism protects against hurt but also against insight. Irony does the opposite: it exposes, it tests, it insists on fragility as a form of truth.
Pekić’s motto—dissect and examine—sounds unheroic beside “build a better world.” Yet examination is itself a kind of improvement. Every untested solution rests on sand. Irony is the building inspector, pointing out the damp walls before the wallpaper goes up.
Here lies the ethic: assert nothing the form cannot bear. A novel that ends in tidy answers has misunderstood literature’s task. Form is argument. A text that shows us how certainty arises has already done more than one that merely hands us certainty.
Critics often ask if literature is “engaged.” Pekić shifts the term. Commitment does not mean parroting the slogans of one’s side; it means taking the world seriously enough to deny it shortcuts. That does not blunt politics; it sharpens it. Reading his Time of Miracles is not catechism but inquiry: how do stories bind reality, and when do they break? It is politics without a commission.
In an age of instant assent—feeds that organize agreement in seconds—irony stretches the pause. It forces us to ask: why do I nod, why resist, which metaphors steer me, and who lent them to me? Ambiguity is a muscle. Without exercise it atrophies. Irony is the gym.
The suspicion remains that irony is sterile. Pekić disagreed: it produces no solutions, and that is its strength. Solutions without testing are propaganda. Irony makes certainties porous, and porous readers change the world—not in metrics, but in durability. First the examination, then the rebuild.
Literature has no executive power. Its only tool is language. But words are not nothing. They are our most sensitive instruments for detecting the relations in which we stand—to ideas, to institutions, to each other. Irony calibrates those instruments. It makes the readings sharper, the error signals visible before the system collapses.

Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Melencolia I (1514), is practically the archetype of the artist’s skeptical stance toward the world. The brooding winged figure sits among instruments of measurement and invention, yet paralyzed in thought. It anchors Pekić’s argument in the Renaissance tension between creation and doubt, echoing his insistence on literature as an analytic rather than constructive force: literature should never deliver solutions, only test their premises.

For a generation under constant pressure to “do something,” this is not an alibi but a liberation: before acting, be precise. Before agreeing, examine. And while examining, allow yourself to be literary—ironical, doubtful, exacting.
Pekić again: “If the writer is no postman, then literature is no post office.” That is not arrogance but humility: before reality, too large for envelopes, and before the reader, who deserves more than a claim slip. To grasp this is to see irony not as impotence but as the strictest form of responsibility. 

Borislav Pekić

Zlatno Doba Dijaloga

Priredile
Ljiljana i Aleksandra Pekić

Književnošću se svet ne gradi, već razlaže i ispituje 

Razgovor vodio novinar R. I. 

Pobjede 6. oktobra 1968. godine