ლიტერატურა და სხეული დავით ქართველიშვილის რომანის, „მეგაპოლისი და ფიზიკური პირები“ კონტექსტში

ანოტაცია

This study is neither a sociological nor a poetic analysis of literature. Rather, it focuses on the contextual dimension in which technogenic modernity absorbs and internalizes the historical roots of culture, transforming both the human being and their reality. The research aims to explore how contemporary Georgian literature reflects the crises of human existence and culture – how these transformations are represented within it. In this respect, the very notion of “modernity” is problematized from the outset: literature is not merely a product or artifact of its time; it is time itself – its structural dimension and a mode of experiencing it.

Within this problematic framework, special attention is given to Davit Kartvelishvili’s novel ,,La Quartet“1 (2023). The theoretical foundation of the analysis draws on phenomenological and hermeneutic paradigms (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur): time, body, and literary text are interpreted as interwoven structures, each carrying a shared crisis-oriented intentionality. In this context, Kartvelishvili’s novel – which constitutes a new aesthetic in contemporary Georgian literature – is approached as both a deconstruction of temporal and cultural crisis and an alternative reality. This reality belongs neither to the matrix of history nor to the familiar tradition of writing, and as such, offers the reader a possible way out of crisis.

A central focus of the study is the crisis of the body. The body is treated as an anthropological marker of both civilizational maturity and decline—one that, under the conditions of technogenic humanism, has become a disembedded, historically disoriented, and physically lost individual in the megapolis. In today’s world, the body appears as a performative and cyber-reflexive phenomenon, while physical relationships – once a mode of social coexistence – are replaced by the virtual. Under these circumstances, the individual finds the body and its cognitive and physical

capacities insufficient. At the same time, this body is dehumanized by social pressure, reduced to a mere biological entity struggling for survival – deprived of the consciousness of trauma. Such a condition leaves the individual without a story, without a narrative that could bind existence to cultural identity or generate political awareness of shared experience.

In Kartvelishvili’s novel, the individual – now reduced to a mere “physical person” – bears precisely this burden: the weight of ontological emptiness. What drives the character is the everyday struggle for physical survival. In such a reality, the individual becomes an emptiness of identity, for their “history” is reduced to the repetition of everyday life, while the deeper roots of consciousness and memory are no longer accessible. As a result, the individual becomes rigid toward affect, as their entire psychic and physiological capacity is consumed by the imperative of mere physical endurance. In this sense, the body emerges as a biosocial form of life anima- ted not by metaphysical meaning, but by intraphysical impulses – bounded, in the end, by the very limits of the body.

The study further interrogates the cultural significance of trauma as a mode of experience. Human beings are, in this perspective, “children of trauma” – born through it, and shaped by its existential unfolding throughout life. Without trauma, the individual remains an empty being or body, incapable of registering experience or forming narrative. Trauma binds together personal and historical identity. In the novel, this problem is foregrounded in the lives of two key characters: a transgender migrant named Meri and an elderly Jewish couple. The latter are united by a shared trauma – both personal and historical – that grants their past the meaning of identity, unity, and collective history. When love is absent, it is trauma that holds together the threads of human and political meaning, thus becoming the foundation for a cultural-historical narrative.

In Meri’s case, however, who survives through daily labor in a foreign land, trauma has not yet become history or narrative. It remains merely a story – a raw telling – because trauma, as an imprint of reality, requires a context – an enemy and a friend – that would allow it to be shaped into narrative and prevent it from being reduced to a banal symptom of suffering. Neither exile nor the caricatured figure of the mercantile aunt offering a profitable marriage suffices to accomplish this transformation. What is needed is another loss – one that marks both the end of the novel and the beginning (or possibility) of a story, one that bears the impulse of birth, trauma, and self-consciousness, because survival without such a story is no longer possible. But that is already another narrative – another (meta)fictional possibility.

One of the novel’s many layers of political irony concerns the modern mythology of success. Success, in the late modern condition, is a subtle strategy for compensating frustration and the loss of those existential elements – love and trauma – that once gave personal identity its deeper meaning.

As for the novel’s poetics, its compositional structure is linear, which the author himself describes as a sequence of links. There is no central plot, no romantic storyline. Rather, the narrative is constructed as a non-sequential chain of loosely connected fragments. The novel’s conceptual and structural composition is an allusion to Dante’s ,,Divine Comedy“: in the capitalist inferno of the “City of Angels“ (Political irony about Los Angeles), the protagonist is followed by the ghost of Franklin, just as Dante is guided by Virgil. And just as hope is meaningless at the gates of Dante’s hell, so too is it at the threshold of the American paradise.