Criticism and Modernity in the Light of Time as a Literary Experience

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the relationship between literature and public consciousness. The research highlights those literary texts that went beyond or go beyond the literary reality and play a constructive role in public consciousness. As much as this power of literature has the ability to shape mode of heredity and to create ways of thinking and living, it requires multifaceted study. In this way, we will be able not only to deeply read the Georgian literary and public culture, to understand their inner connection in a new way, but also to form clearer views about what this culture could be like tomorrow.

 The study is inspired by the painful process of transformation of consciousness and culture in Georgia, as a post-Soviet country. Literature, as a kind of reflection on reality, speaks volumes in this sense. It can make visible the cultural habitus embedded in social reality. And since literature is a field of crystallization of the empirical and the symbolic, it calls for analysis – an inquiry into the relationship between the empirical and the symbolic.

 From this point of view, the paper is focused on several works of the last century, namely Georgian adventure novels, which were written after the Russian occupation of Georgia (1921), as an immediate literary reflection on the political consequences.

 Mikheil Javakhishvili's novel "Kvachi Kvachantiradze" conveys not only how a person can be degraded when the political context is still unstable and does not create conditions for moral formation, but also reaches the cultural roots that reveal the origin of human morality and social behavior. The problem of Javakhishvili's "Jako’s Dispossesed” is the other extreme – on the one hand, moralism, which does not imply the goal of survival, and, on the other hand, – infantilism, which deprives moralism of its content depth. The author does not stop within the historical framework of the communist Soviet Union, he reaches the historical layers of Georgian consciousness and tries to show the cause-and-effect relationship between the past and the present.

 The main object of the present study is contemporary Georgian literature. In this context, it became the subject of analysis that literature, instead of a symbolic act, can be revealed as a kind of symptom of consciousness, in which the symbol (be it versification or figurative) has the function of an entourage, and not a creative act. A symbol and a symptom differ from each other in that a symbol is a creative act, a symptom is a sign of a social organism.

 From this point of view, Erekle Deisadze's poem ,,I love in Thieves Style” drew our attention. The central social allusion of the poem (Thieving mentality) is a reference to an informal institution of power in the Soviet period – the street, which enjoyed authority and, to some extent, still enjoys it today. This negative social inertia is reinforced by factors impeding the development of political and civil culture, among which the judicial reform has not yet been carried out, due to which the corrupt and politically biased system weighs heavily on the psycho-mental body of the society. The poetic energy of the discussed poem flows into the versification and poetic form of the Soviet patriotic poetry familiar to everyone in Georgia, with this anachronism the author expresses the (desired?) continuity of the connection with time. This poem is an example of such a fusion of aesthetic and social codes, which produces a kind of emotional spark, affect, and revives the stereotype on which both social and aesthetic tastes stand. Such a synergy of social and aesthetic goes beyond the scope of literature and acquires political intent.

 More specifically: the poem has several layers – one, the patriotic poetic affect of the Soviet era (constructed by the poetics of Mukhran Machavariani), the second, left-wing humanism and the third, "thief or criminal world", which is parodically affiliated with the left-wing ideology and patriotic affect.

 Next to this social and poetic fact, another poetic voice can be heard in contemporary Georgian poetry, which is a kind of contextual plane in relation to the literary text discussed above. This is a sample of Dato Barbakadze's poetic mystification, in which the symptoms of a morally diseased cultural body appear through self-observation and thus gain symbolic meaning. Dato Barbakadze's poem parodies the immoral voice of ugly social morality, which is heard with all its might in the Soviet sociolect – "unowned" (a person without power and influence, under the protection of no one and nothing, whom no one takes seriously due to this social loneliness). The poem is a statement of the reality in which the cultural-poetic anachronism mentioned above can be fulfilled.

 In the paper, we focused on the public role of the writer in such a small culture as Georgia. In the relatively distant past, in the 19th century, when the author's public figure was actively emerging, and later – in the recent Soviet past, writers in Georgia performed an important public function. The socio-political positions of the writer were not affected by the fact that the country was a zone of influence of big political players, as well as the pressure of the Soviet regime. On the contrary, this situation gave the writer more functions as a compensation for the non-existent institutional and civil resonance that would be possible in an independent state. Obviously, this courage was neither universal nor frequent, although its manifestations always had the importance of national salvation. Only in modern Georgia, as a new democracy of the international community, the reality has changed. A writer is no longer a flag bearer in the political field. Instead, the space in which he politically positioned himself is somewhat empty and waiting to be filled. There seems to be a temptation to embrace this field, and there is, among other things, a passion for creating a social chemistry in which poetry is a means, not an end. In itself, this is neither good nor bad news. This can be determined by the context.

 Therefore, we ask questions: what does this aesthetic regression tell us? Are reality and literature immune to each other? Is literature a legislator or an executer? These are the critical questions of the present work, which are relevant to the extent that the power of touching reality is strong, which gives rise to them in modern Georgia.

 In light of these questions, the paper problematizes the issue of the limits of literature, both in terms of the resource of influence and in relation to political power. In this context, the aesthetics of Georgian protest speeches from the 1990s to the present are particularly informative; namely, how the national and then the personal charisma of the political leaders of the dissident past was replaced by the individualistic energy of the masses.

The presented research, which was aimed at analyzing the relationship between empirical and symbolic, reality and text, shows that on real or virtual platforms of mass demonstrations and civil activism, as well as social representation, the personal voice of the poet, which was also the historical voice of the poetic authority, was replaced by the collectivist cry of the public speaker (poet-activist). As a service to this change, as a kind of intangible cultu­ral monument, Georgian classical poetry appears to us, which is a living sign of the cultural degeneration of this poetry, so attractive to the masses prone to cultural necrophilia. It is therefore not surprising that this degeneracy towards questionable public instincts is valid. In other words: a versification or other poetic symbol, as a linguistic and cultural phenomenon, under certain conditi­ons is transformed into a symptom – a clinical sign of the social body.

 Finally, it cannot be said that the transitional cultural area, which connects empirical and symbolic realities, is filled today with a completely new force, another socio-cultural subject – a new voice of a new generation. It is still in the process of political birth, which is irreversible, and we expect it to have its say in the cultural arena as well. After the national movement of the 1970-80s, today we are witnessing the birth of a new civil movement in Georgia. One of the essential results that this process can bring is the differentiation of creative and civic energy in the right direction. This means that the literary word will find itself in the position of an observer instead of an interested one and will perform the function that a symbol would have, not a symptom.