ქალაქი, როგორც ქაოსის მეტაფორა (ზურაბ ქარუმიძის “ღვინომუქ ზღვაში“ მორჩილაძის „მადათოვის ტრილოგიაში”)

Abstract

Significant political crises and armed conflicts of the 20th century gave birth to the world urban literature. Georgian literature, too, entered a phase of searching for a new chronotope, one capable of imposing artistic order upon a devastated reality. Much like in world literature, the city became a central chronotope and structural anchor in Georgian writing as well.

This paper explores the city as a metaphor for chaos in Zurab Karumidze’s novel: Wine-Dark Sea. Karumidze’s postmodern novel was published in 2000, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Upon publication, the work was regarded as a radical experiment, largely because it almost entirely rejected a conventional narrative structure and plot. Instead, it presents an apparently amorphous blend of metatexts, riddles, allegories, allusions, and mystifications, infused with elements of esotericism, physics, and metaphysics.

The “Wine-Dark Sea” of the novel is Tbilisi itself, populated by both real and imagined characters. Although the novel lacks a linear narrative and unfolds as an unusual mixture of allusions and mystifications, Tbilisi remains the central axis around which the seemingly fragmented stories revolve. The depiction of Tbilisi begins in a restrained and almost documentary manner before gradually transforming into a postmodern experiment.

In the novel, artistic space, namely Tbilisi, is not idealized. On the contrary, it becomes a metaphor for chaos, irrationality, and absurdity. The text itself reflects this condition: at first glance, it appears as an amorphous experimental novel in which events do not follow a chronological or logical sequence. In many ways, the same can be said of the era to which the Wine-Dark Sea seemingly alludes, the 1990s, the deeply chaotic and destructive period of “reconstruction,” which brought collapse and war. The choice of the city as the literary chronotope fundamentally shapes the entire structure and thematic direction of the novel. A work that initially appears to be about everything and nothing at the same time, ultimately reveals to be a novel about Tbilisi. Through the prism of postmodernism, the novel reimagines the city’s history, mythological texture, whilst simultaneously reflecting on the recent past and its lasting influence on the city’s future.