Gry językowe w rosyjskiej prozie postmodernistycznej. Między poetyką a filozofią języka

Abstract

The study shows a diversity and functionality of language games in Russian postmodern fiction. The analysis aims at proving the crucial role of language games in terms of style, composition and epistemology of novels by Sasha Sokolov, Valeria Narbikova and Victor Pelevin. Narrative specifity of Sasha Sokolov’s novel Between Dog and Wolf is determined by a tendency to expose liminality, by a fascination with heterogeneity and fluidity of the text’s meanings. The novel’s characters are thus variable, complex and ambiguous. Narrative style shimmers as a sophisticated mix of different types and modes of language, different tones, emotions and attitudes. A scrappy plot can be hardly re-established by reader, which finds herself deeply involved in the play of multi-faceted interferences and altered repetitions. The novel Between Dog and Wolf sustains a chain of stories and micro-stories built with interfering genre-aware language games, on all levels: from prosody to semantics. A reader is thus seriously challenged by processuality and overt relativeness of the text's meanings. She encounters a deep genre-mixing, multidimensional characters, settings and plot, ontological and epistemic instability, alternating repetitions, shifting narrative instances and intertextual references. Sokolov avoids stable boundaries between components of the fictional world he has created. Instead of realistic approach, he submits a disturbing but fascinating out-of-focus worldview, as the title of the novel early suggests. Sasha Sokolov plays also with time as a philosophical, cultural and existential category. His experiments involve stylistic and structural diversity: interference of discourses, simultaneous narration, blurring boundaries between analepsis and prolepsis, and “looping” the chronotope. In the third chapter the study outlines modes of an „opaque” discourse manifestation in selected works of Valeria Narbikova. Variety of tropes based on repetition (alliteration, enumeration, tautology, paronomasia etc.) is revealed the main characteristic of language games, treated rather as an elementary strategy of language functioning, than a simple ornament or obstacle. Expansiveness of the game leads to cracking the structure and showing rifts. It’s a result of this structure’s maximization. Two coexisting tendencies appear to define this condition: autoirony and narcissism. Autoirony serves as a critic selfconsciousness opening new perspectives, transgressive nature of a sign. Narcissism – at the further end – seeks stabilization by enclosing within tautological truth, though it cumulates energy of a language. In the works of Valeria Naribkova, analyzed in the thesis (Day Equals Night, or, The Equilibrium of Diurnal and Nocturnal Starlight, Plan pervogo litsa. I vtorogo, Shepot shuma), mutual relations between language and fictional world are reversed. The language – a matter of words – is not a constructive element and „vehicle”, but a hero of its own story. Emerging and expanding of a sign's existence determines the ontology of fictional world and subordinates all its components: plot, character, time and space. Nevertheless, Narbikova tries to recover a satirical narrative devices. Distorting mirror of her fiction reflects not only the Soviet reality of 80s, but also universal human affairs. In Omon Ra Victor Pelevin creates a vision of Soviet Union and its simulated outer-space conquering program. It is a postmodern novel, but also satirical, parodistic and tragic at the same time. Pelevin's The Helmet of Horror, which contains a strange vision of an internet chat as a maze (contemporary version of an ancient myth of Minotaur), becomes a labyrinth itself. It condemns characters within the novel – as well as a reader –to an endless roaming in a jungle of possibilities, theories and speculations. Pelevin deconstructs the canonical discourse of myth, showing false stability of centralized structure. Instead, his work offers an open discourse with a shifting center. In the novel entitled The Life of Insects a specific reality emerges: the area of play, which comes into existence at the boundary between three interfering aspects: realistic, fantastic and allegorical. This area's characteristic contains: endless expanding of signification process, relativity, cognitive uncertainty, ontological indeterminism, hybrid composition of man and world, essential mechanism of demythologizing. In the center of a collision of schematism and uncommonness we can find characters' activities, which seem to be embraced by conventional plots, but remain uncommon due to characters' fantastic features. Pelevin's characters are multidimensional, but – ultimately – they are subordinates of the text's playful strategy. The way the meaning structures are raised in Pelevin's novel deprives a reader of possibility of securing a firm sense (a clear world view), and condemns him/her to an endless interpretation marked by continuous hesitation. Language games help – in a meaningful way – to surpass traditional understanding of such essential aspects of fiction as subject and mimesis. They function as a focus of postmodern paradigm. The analysis has revealed the specificity of postmodern approach to language games, and confirmed the hypothesis, that Russian writers – while using ontological, epistemological and stylistic attitudes – were also focused on transcending limitations of postmodernism, e.g. in attempts to restore mimesis, satire or tragism within the fictional and metafictional games.