Some years ago, I coined and developed the concept of ‘anarchetype’.1 I used it to define texts and clusters of texts with a ‘flawed design’ or with no compositional structure and logical coherence. In contrast to writers who complied with the Aristotelian principles of unified plot, organic composition, sequential order of the parts, global sense, etc., many others chose to ignore them and gave free rein to narrative fantasy. Their works were therefore anarchical, decentred and loosely configured, with no hierarchical organisation or clear cogito. Or, throughout European history, most poetic and aesthetic systems insisted that Aristotle’s precepts should be respected. Texts that failed to do so were marginalised, vilified, devalued, and dismissed from the ranks of high-brow literature. In other words, they were not included in the literary canons of the time. Moreover, not only individual compositions, but entire literary (sub)genres preferred to ignore the prerequisite of a well-designed structure: from ancient Hellenistic and Roman novels to medieval and Renaissance chivalric romances, or from picaresque and adventure novels, extraordinary voyages, and fantasy fiction to numerous modernist and postmodernist texts. Such works deliberately avoid rounded-off plots and defy conventional models.
Examining such bodies of ‘unruly’ literary texts, the present volume gathers a series of studies written by a small team of Romanian scholars as part of a research project financed by the Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalisation, UEFISCDI (project number PN-III-P4-PCE-2021-1234), on the topic ‘Anarchetypes. A re-evaluation of some marginal literary forms and genres.’ In the opening chapter I introduce the concept of ‘anarchetype’ and describe some of its formal image schemas: the cluster, the domino game, the LEGO game, and the mycelium. I continue with a second chapter, on ancient Greek and Latin novels, from Petronius’ Satyricon to Lucian’s True Histories. In these works, in contrast with the mythical epos, tragedy and other elite ancient genres, the storytelling breaks free from formal constraints and unfolds anarchically. It features plot bifurcations, digressions, embedded parallel stories, and open-ended, zigzagging narrative lines.
The next chapter, by Radu Toderici, focuses on a range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French poetic treatises that reveal the marginal position occupied by anomalous narratives, such as extraordinary and utopian (dystopian) voyages, or adventure and picaresque novels, within the framework of a post-Aristotelian system of genres developed by neoclassical analysts Charles Sorel, Adrien Baillet and Nicolas Lenglet Dufresnoy. Carmen Borbély furthers the discussion by looking at eighteenth-century English literature and showing that, against the poetics of prose that was shaping up at the time, almost all the novels published during this period engaged in disruptive experiments with narrative form, rather than abiding by normative precepts.
In Chapter 5, Marius Conkan surveys the dawn of speculative fiction and fantasy literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Discussing works authored by titans like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Conkan shows how the genre as a whole disregarded the Aristotelian principle of mimesis but embraced the freedom and playfulness of myth, magic, the fantastic, or even the absurd (as seen in the transmedial afterlife of Alice’s Adventures).
In Chapter 6, Alex Văsieș grapples with another unclassifiable corpus of texts: the so-called maximalist, encyclopaedic novels of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and David Foster Wallace. The ambition of these novels to assume the richness and complexity of world-systems renders them vulnerable to the dangers of ‘infinite jests’, as submersion into cruft (useless information) and clusters of chaotic details becomes unavoidable. In the next chapter, Ruxandra Cesereanu discusses two anarchetypal maximalist narratives, the novels Blinding and Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, in which the writer’s brain maps trace the rhizomic and mycelial contours of a total world vision that is ultimately revealed to be the cerebral Book of the Universe.
The last three chapters approach an important literary trope with enhanced potential for disrupting narrative linearity and plot closure: the voyage, wandering, or flânerie. Starting from the ways in which America was constructed by westbound explorers, Maria Barbu analyses the postmodernist novels of Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, whose characters erratically roam the countryside or traipse through the city, in search for lost childhood dreams or the quiet of pre-apocalyptic times. Călina Părău takes up the concept of flâneur from Walter Benjamin and applies it to works by Franz Hessel, Fernando Pessoa, Antonio Muñoz Molina and Lauren Elkin, showing that purposeless individual strolls through the streets of modern cities can build alternative maps to those of globalised, hyper-saturated, consumerist societies. These other maps can connect the differences, remainders or near invisible details that make up the multi-layered identities of cohesive communities. The last chapter, by Laura T. Ilea, is envisioned not so much as a conclusion but as an overture, suggesting that anarchetypal narrative forms have a correspondent in today’s ‘planetary entanglements’ and postcolonial migrations, epitomised by the ‘nomadic’ characters of Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Elif Shafak, and Norman Manea.
All in all, the studies included in this volume examine a diverse array of literary texts, corpora, and genres that have resisted the pressure of Aristotle’s canonical poetics and experimented with forms of narrative in which the absence of ‘structure’ and ‘logos’ (or global signification) allow for concealed, unpredictable, and chaotic aspects of the world and of the human psyche to be freely explored.
Corin Braga
See Braga C., De la arhetip la anarhetip (Iaşi: 2006). See also Braga C., “Anarchetype: Reading Aesthetic Form after ‘Structure’”, in Matei A. – Moraru C. – Terian A. (eds.), Theory in the ‘Post’ Era. A Vocabulary for the 21st- Century Conceptual Commons (New York – London – Dublin: 2021) 121–139.