Antropofagia ca paradigmă a violenţei extreme. Reflectări în distopiile românești (V. Beneș, Gheorghe Săsărman și Ligia Pârvulescu)
Anthropophagy as a paradigm of extreme violence. Reflections on Romanian dystopias (V. Beneș, Gheorghe Săsărman and Ligia Pârvulescu)

Summary/Abstract: My study examines the way in which manhunt and anthropophagy function in Romanian dystopias as narrative devices of total violence, exploring not only their anthropological filiations, but also their political and cultural meanings, by relating them to the context in which they were elaborated. To this end, I will begin by synthesizing the main valences and meanings attributed to anthropophagy in different academic fields. Next, I will analyze three typologically different dystopias from Romania, written in socio-politically and ideologically disturbed historical epochs. The short story Amo, amas, amat... (1943) by V. Beneș illustrates the so-called classic totalitarian dystopia, relying on a male character without a name or a precise identity, engaged in an unequal struggle with a barbaric horde, in whose violent actions one can guess any totalitarian system. The visionary prose Motopia, which Gheorghe Săsărman manages to publish in 1975, incapsulates the cyberpunk imagery. However, by giving these sinister creatures a narrative functionality of rare cruelty, the writer transforms them into a monstrous technical otherness of the communist party. Ligia Pârvulescu’s novel, entitled Translucid (2021), fully illustrates the specific features of feminist dystopia, betting in its first part on an authentic scenography of horror, in which the feminine receives limited narrative roles. Even when it does not become an essential narrative nexus, as in the dystopian scheme, anthropophagy can only symbolize the degradation of the human being to the point of total extinction.

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