A spider at work: the archetype of Arachne in the reflexive imagology of literature

The article examines the formation of the archetype of a literary "text", which is suggested to be called "the archetype of Arachne", in mythopoeia and literary poetics. Its origin lies in the Ancient Greek and Latin words meaning "strong and balanced inner bonds, interlacement". The image of the language is actualized in the ancient myth about the dispute of Arachne and the patron of weaving, Athena. Originally, the mythical image first takes shape in the plot construction of Ovid's poetics and in one of the Metamorphoses parts. There is a transformation to take place which consists in the changeover form syncretic imagology suggesting the integrity of a myth and a language, an author and a character, to the rhetorical one which supposes a plot to develop the concept of an imaging word cloth, "ut picture poesis", poetry as a carpet or a picture, so important for all the ancient world. An archetype, in our sense, is a figurative style, a text-generating matrix which, being reflected or non-reflected, influences the text-building of a relatively small number of most authoritative and programmed author's texts. The author's reflection of an archetype of individual poetics and systematizing meta-definitions can be shown as a chain of three creative literal strategies changing one other. For the first strategy, which goes back to Christian liturgical rhetoric, the author uses a "woven" word form, a "curved" word for praising God and the world He created. Such meta-poetical metaphors are typical, first of all, for Old Russian booklore and Russian symbolism. For the second strategy, the author, or a character that mediates the author's reflection of the word, opposes their "woven whole" to the sacral world order, often challenging "the Sky", gods or God, any authoritative instance including the government. For the third strategy of this collective reflection of literature, the author (or their writing character-mediator) realizes their theomachic "demonic" state using the metaphor of a spider beast or the world web that subordinated time and space. The archetype is actualized on different levels of a literary text as the trope of a spider and a web, the spider as a character connected with the creativity and magical art potentially dangerous for the world order, the web as a significant metapoetic detail connected with the creativity and imaginary power over the world. In the article, the archetype is revealed through different art systems, different literary ages and different national literatures, in particular, Old Russian literature, naturalism, Russian symbolism and post-symbolism, Russian and foreign post-modernism at the close of the 20th century.

Keywords

Authors

References