implied reader

The following text aims to analyze a growing mass of clichés and their penetrating power in popular Bulgarian literature. To understand how common notions are shared between the author and the implied reader we will discuss “More than love” by Radoslav Gizgindzhiev. It is a bizarre novel, where quasi-spiritual slogans are entangled with prescriptive and hypnotic guidance, which constitutes the narrator as an omnipotent godlike figure. Along with that, the analysis is focused on tracing how a peculiar mix of popular “quotes”, media imitations, and superstitions could melt into a story that becomes a market success.

Within the framework of the research project “Reading Practices in Bulgaria 2018”, the text presents an analysis of a Bulgarian contemporary literary work directed towards the popular reading taste. Nedyalko Slavov’s novel Piaffe is a fictional narrative that clearly targets the wide Bulgarian readership. It is amongst the top-ranking widely-read books in Bulgaria of 2018. The novel treats the subject of doomed love between a man and woman via a mixture of mythological allegories and metaphysical conceptions, forming a stereotypical axiological model of erotic interaction. Situating the love conflict within the cultural context of complex and challenging modernity, this strategy ultimately produces a multiplication of popular ideologemes and mythologemes, which are supposedly overlooked by the reader who is expected to treat them uncritically and beyond any self-assessment. The novel is an example of auto-exoticization of one's own/the native through its refraction in the context of the foreign/unknown, thus implying a stereotypically ignorant or ill-informed Bulgarian reader who is nonetheless capable of gaining high-level cultural competence both in relation to local conventions and clichés, and to the complex system of values of a progressive but largely undigested foreign culture.