Analele universităŢii din craiova

NOTE

BIBLIOGRAFIE

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ABSTRACT

Starting from Cuşnarencu`s novel we argue that the function of the myth in postmodernism is different from the role it used to play in classical and modernist literature. Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Orestes and Memory herself (Memoria) are characters in this ironic and playful fictional world, but their names are arbitrary labels that bear no intrinsic relation to their life. The mythical plot is reversed through parody: the prestigious name has a magnetic force (a mechanism we describe by the logic of “nomen est omen”) but the archetype it designates is now devoid of substance, so that, for instance one of the characters, the bovaric and neurotic Clytemnestra feels as if she is made of wax.

While T.S. Eliot considered that in Joyce`s Ullyses the Homeric scheme was destined to give a sense of order to “the immense panorama of anarchy and futility that is contemporary history”, in Cuşnarencu`s carnivalesque novel the myth is the same as doom, fatality, absurd predestination. Where the Classical world found (and the modernist authors tried to find) coherence and identification, the postmodernist writer discovers alienation. Still, this awareness does not entail tragic gravity but derision or indifference. The American writer John Barth, together with critics such as Manfred Pütz and Adrian Oţoiu (among others), support the view that the postmodernist mindset lacks the belief in the true symbolic value of traditional myths. Mythology as puzzle and collage is part of the poetics of postmodernism, alongside other devices: irony, intertextual reference, an apparently aleatory functioning of cultural memory. Postmodernism is compensated by popular culture. Pulp literature (especially science fiction) fills the symbolic void: it is, in its own fashion, a mythological Ersatz.