The Motif of Carnival in Christoph Ransmayr’s 'Die letzte Welt' (1988): Classical and Nietzschean Elements as Connection between Antiquity and Modernity

"Aus allen Häusern brachen Vermummte hervor, um die Fastnachtsfreiheit bis zum Morgengrauen und zur Erschöpfung zu nützen. Jeder verwandelte sich in sein Geheimnis und Gegenteil." (DlW, p.78) The presentation focuses on the novel 'Die letzte Wel't ('The Last World', 1988) by the Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr. The novel adapts the historical event of the exile of the Roman poet Ovid in Tomi (today’s Constanța in Romania) from a postmodern perspective and questions concepts such as truth and rationality. In order to find his perhaps dead friend and poet in exile, and also to escape the pressures of a repressive central state, the Roman Cotta ventures into this for the time and the Rome-centric view ‘exotic’ territory. This adventure leads to a spiritual turning point for the main character. The journey to the ‘frontiers’ of the world leads the protagonist to abandon his rational Roman perspective and enter into a world of chaos and uncertainty that constitutes Tomi’s wild reality. Specifically, my contribution focuses on the fourth chapter of the novel, in which the Roman Cotta, after escaping from Ovid’s house in the village of Trachila, returns to Tomi at night and finds himself in the carnival celebrations. During his escape, before entering the town, he runs into a figure that somehow resembles the character of Lycaon, but also a wolf. When he arrives in Tomi, however, he enters the chaotic and dissolute carnival of Tomi, where masks referring to gods and mythology protect the identity of individuals who indulge in alcohol and sexual promiscuity. This chapter is part of a broader discourse addressed in the novel, namely the opposition between Rome, the city of reason and clarity, and Tomi, the city of chaos and darkness, which has its origin in the opposition in the young Nietzsche’s writings between Apollonian and Dionysian. This motif is also developed in chapter four of Ransmayr’s novel with the narration of the carnival, which seems to present characteristics of the Greek Dionysia and the Roman Saturnalia, given the presence of masks, carnival floats and the dissolution of class and relational bonds, but cannot but intersect with the modern discourse developed by Nietzsche, who saw the expression of the Dionysian as a manifestation of the ‘spring spirit’, which sent the public into ecstasy during Dionysian processions, and as a suppression of the principium individuationis, given in the novel by the aesthetic function of darkness and masks, which prevent a correct perception of reality. These motifs, moreover, intersect in the novel with the broader motif of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an omnipresent intertextual link within the novel, causing the novel’s characters, who have their origin in Ovid’s work, masquerading to become other than themselves. The contribution attempts to reconstruct the connections between these different traditions and sources that seem to somehow overlap and complement each other, giving rise to a late 20th-century and postmodern representation of classical motifs.