BODIES OF BUTTERFLIES. TRANSFORMED BODIES AND THE TRANSFIGURATION OF FICTIONAL WORLDS IN ORBITOR, BY MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU
BODIES OF BUTTERFLIES. TRANSFORMED BODIES AND THE TRANSFIGURATION OF FICTIONAL WORLDS IN ORBITOR, BY MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU

Summary/Abstract: Mircea Cărtărescu’s trilogy begins with the exposition (and the exposure) of the theoretical body, a mixture of oriental doctrines and postmodern fantasies, canceling the taboos of Western tradition, emphasizing strange symmetries or bizarre visions, trying to reach the form and destiny of a butterfly, in its metamorphosis from larva to flight. While such observations about the proliferating postmodernist metamorphoses, tending to replace the schemata of high-modernism, have become commonplaces of interpretation, less has been said about the characters’ reluctance in following the narrator’s vision. Although it claims to follow Roland Barthes’s model of writing and reading as erotic acts, the novel describes a rather sadistic eros, marked by ritualized dissections and eviscerations. The concrete bodies refuse to freely show themselves in all their (butter-)flying glory. Instead of splendor (as announced by the model), we are shown the atrocity of violation and the grotesque succession of mutilations; all these speed up hurry the metamorphosis artificially and shed light (in the most concrete-carnal meaning) on the “butterflies” inside the body (the hemispheres of the brain, a section of the spine, the pelvis bones, the female genitals). The final goal is to access a superior fictional world, transfigured by these sacrifices, to tame the God brought into being. This process has an analogue in the meta-narrative world, in the relationship between the female bodies, reluctant to obey the marvelous metamorphoses the narrator would prescribe. The double subversion, feminist and actantial, represents a typically postmodern portable schematization of the modern revolutionary and foundational gesture, making the text function as a schematized replica to the historically modern emancipatory gesture.

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