Was There Corelli at All? Contemporary Literature Between the Images of Ontic and Virtual Emancipation of Personality (Notes on the Topic)

Abstract

Based on the data of modern post-Fregean logic (J. Hintikka, B. Lourié and others), the author considers the plurality of virtual worlds in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s tetralogy The Cemetery of Forgotten Books (2001–2016). Turning to the idea of a “book zero” (J.L. Borges, C. Camps Mundó) and especially to V.N. Toporov’s philosophy of Russian literature (The Thing in the Anthropocentric Perspective, or The Apology of Plyushkin), the author suggests that the tetralogy fails to present a final narrative about the fate of one of the main characters, David Martín, and that his and his girlfriend Cristina Sagnier’s fates can be considered quite similar to those of the characters in Goethe’s Faust, who, as we learn in the end, are saved due to love, creativity and longing for eternal femininity. Further, the article discusses some possible precedents for Zafón’s tetralogy (The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier, Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez) and hypothesizes, based on the ideas of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, about the existence of two large groups of literary works devoted to the plurality of worlds: in the first group, the characters’ redemption is thought of and portrayed as purely psychological or virtual, while the devil (and the spiritual ideal of the characters) as non-existent. Zafón’s novels definitely belong to the second category as asserting the real ontology of the virtual world. For example, the final refuge of Martín and Cristina resembles Dante’s and Mikhail Bulgakov’s limbo. Thus, the author of this paper believes that both Corelli (as either the Evil One or his high-ranking representative) and the place of Martín’s final redemption are real, in full accordance with the postFregean logic of virtual worlds and partly even contrary to the writer’s own instructions (given, however, through the haze of virtuality) in the tetralogy’s recently published fourth volume The Labyrinth of Spirits.