DECONSTRUCTION OF ARCHETYPES IN THE EROTIC-THANATOLOGICAL SPACE OF POSTMODERNIST NOVELS WRITTEN BY YURII ANDRUKHOVYCH

Abstract

It is a common knowledge that, in the postmodern era, defined as the era of extinction, love ('Éρως) and death (Θάνατος) lose the status of binary oppositions and become polymorphic correspondences, which, in our opinion, can be most logically perceived and interpreted with the help of deconstruction. After all, in modern philosophy, the text is transmitted as a sign, and accordingly it can be deciphered with the help of certain codes, and interpreted, according to Paul Ricker, “as the work of thinking, which consists in deciphering the meaning behind the obvious content, the meanings encrypted, hidden in the literal meaning” [19, c. 18]. Therefore, the double and multiple coding characteristic of postmodernism provides different possibilities of understanding and interpretation for different subjects, deforms or even eliminates the author’s self, mixes styles, quotations and allusions. Such a text becomes erotocentric, turns into a certain immanent expression of the category of corporeality. Thus, according to Roland Barthes, the direct dependence of the “birth of the reader” (the embodiment of the instinct of creation, identical to 'Éρως) on the “death of the author” (as the embodiment of the instinct of destruction presented by the forces of Θάνατος) is revealed and, thus the reception of the dyad “'Éρως- θάνατος” is actualized as the one that, according to Sigmund Freud and his follower Herbert Marcuse, structures the modern world. In the later manifestations of postmodernism (the end of the ХХ and the beginning of the ХХІ century), which were significantly influenced by deconstructivity theory (in particular, in the interpretation of Jacques Derrida), the fascination with psychoanalysis and archetypal images, which is usual for postmodern aesthetics, also undergoes a certain deconstruction, perceiving and – most importantly – demonstrating somewhat new vision of those concepts or images that became classic in the philosophy of S. Freud, С.-G. Jung and their followers. This study allows us to trace the successive deconstruction of archetypal images and symbols in the novels of the modern Ukrainian writer Yurii Andrukhovych. In particular, we are talking about his works at the turn of the millennium, the text “The Perversion” (1996) and the novel “The Twelve Rings” (2003), which, in our point of view, have been significantly influenced by deconstructivism, especially in the interpretation of the philosophical and cultural dyad “Love-Death” (“Éρως and θάνατος”).