3. Fiction. Conventionality and life-likeness
Fiction in the early stages of the development of art, as a rule, was not realized: the archaic consciousness did not distinguish between historical and artistic truth. But already in folk tales, which never present themselves as a mirror of reality, conscious fiction is quite clearly expressed. We find judgments about artistic fiction in Aristotle’s “Poetics” (chapter 9—the historian talks about what happened, the poet talks about the possible, about what could happen), as well as in the works of philosophers of the Hellenistic era.
For a number of centuries, fiction has appeared in literary works as a common property, as inherited by writers from their predecessors. Most often, these were traditional characters and plots, which were somehow transformed each time (this was the case (92), in particular, in the drama of the Renaissance and classicism, which widely used ancient and medieval plots).
Much more than was the case before, fiction manifested itself as the individual property of the author in the era of romanticism, when imagination and fantasy were recognized as the most important facet of human existence. "Fantasy<...>- wrote Jean-Paul, - there is something higher, it is the world soul and the elemental spirit of the main forces (such as wit, insight, etc. - V.Kh.)<...>Fantasy is hieroglyphic alphabet nature" 1. The cult of imagination, characteristic of the beginning of the 19th century, marked the emancipation of the individual, and in this sense constituted a positively significant fact of culture, but at the same time it also had negative consequences (artistic evidence of this is the appearance of Gogol’s Manilov, the fate of the hero of Dostoevsky’s White Nights) .
In the post-romantic era, fiction somewhat narrowed its scope. Flights of imagination of writers of the 19th century. often preferred direct observation of life: characters and plots were close to their prototypes. According to N.S. Leskova, a real writer is a “note-taker,” and not an inventor: “Where a writer ceases to be a note-taker and becomes an inventor, all connection between him and society disappears” 2. Let us also recall Dostoevsky’s well-known judgment that a close eye is capable of detecting in the most ordinary fact “a depth that is not found in Shakespeare” 3 . Russian classic literature was more a literature of conjecture” than of fiction as such 4 . At the beginning of the 20th century. fiction was sometimes regarded as something outdated, rejected in the name of reconstruction real fact, documented. This extreme has been disputed 5 . The literature of our century - as before - relies widely on both fiction and non-fictional events and persons. At the same time, the rejection of fiction in the name of following the truth of the fact, in some cases justified and fruitful 6, can hardly become the main line of artistic creativity: without relying on fictional images, art and, in particular, literature are unrepresentable.
Through fiction, the author summarizes the facts of reality, embodies his view of the world, and demonstrates his creative energy. Z. Freud argued that artistic fiction is associated with unsatisfied drives and suppressed desires of the creator of the work and involuntarily expresses them 7.
The concept of artistic fiction clarifies the boundaries (sometimes very vague) between works that claim to be art and documentary information. If documentary texts (verbal and visual) exclude the possibility of fiction from the outset, then works with the intention of perceiving them as fiction readily allow it (even in cases where the authors limit themselves to recreating actual facts, events, and persons). Messages in literary texts are, as it were, on the other side of truth and lies. At the same time, the phenomenon of artistry can also arise when perceiving a text created with a documentary mindset: “... for this it is enough to say that we are not interested in the truth of this story, that we read it “as if it were the fruit<...>writing" 1.
Forms of “primary” reality (which is again absent in “pure” documentary) are reproduced by the writer (and artist in general) selectively and in one way or another transformed, resulting in a phenomenon that D.S. Likhachev named internal the world of the work: “Every work of art reflects the world of reality in its creative perspectives<...>. The world of a work of art reproduces reality in a certain “abbreviated”, conditional version<...>. Literature takes only some phenomena of reality and then conventionally reduces or expands them” 2.
At the same time, there are two trends in artistic imagery, which are designated by the terms convention(the author’s emphasis on non-identity, or even opposition, between what is depicted and the forms of reality) and lifelikeness(leveling such differences, creating the illusion of the identity of art and life). The distinction between convention and life-likeness is already present in the statements of Goethe (article “On truth and verisimilitude in art”) and Pushkin (notes on drama and its improbability). But the relationship between them was especially intensely discussed at the turn of the 19th – (94) 20th centuries. L.N. carefully rejected everything implausible and exaggerated. Tolstoy in his article “On Shakespeare and His Drama.” For K.S. Stanislavsky’s expression “conventionality” was almost synonymous with the words “falsehood” and “false pathos.” Such ideas are associated with an orientation towards the experience of Russian realistic literature of the 19th century, the imagery of which was more life-like than conventional. On the other hand, many artists of the early 20th century. (for example, V.E. Meyerhold) preferred conventional forms, sometimes absolutizing their significance and rejecting life-likeness as something routine. Thus, in the article P.O. Jacobson's “On Artistic Realism” (1921) emphasizes conventional, deforming, and difficult techniques for the reader (“to make it more difficult to guess”) and denies verisimilitude, which is identified with realism as the beginning of the inert and epigonic 3 . Subsequently, in the 1930s – 1950s, on the contrary, life-like forms were canonized. They were considered the only acceptable ones for the literature of socialist realism, and convention was suspected of being related to odious formalism (rejected as bourgeois aesthetics). In the l960s, the rights of artistic convention were again recognized. Nowadays, the view has become firmly established that life-likeness and conventionality are equal and fruitfully interacting tendencies of artistic imagery: “like two wings on which creative imagination rests in an indefatigable thirst to find out the truth of life” 4.
At the early historical stages in art, forms of representation prevailed, which are now perceived as conventional. This is, firstly, generated by a public and solemn ritual idealizing hyperbole traditional high genres(epic, tragedy), the heroes of which manifested themselves in pathetic, theatrically effective words, poses, gestures and had exceptional appearance features that embodied their strength and power, beauty and charm. (Remember the epic heroes or Gogol’s Taras Bulba). And secondly, this grotesque, which was formed and strengthened as part of carnival celebrations, acting as a parody, laughter “double” of the solemn-pathetic one, and later acquired programmatic significance for the romantics 1 . It is customary to call the artistic transformation of life forms, leading to some kind of ugly incongruity, to the combination of incompatible things, grotesque. Grotesque in art is akin to paradox in (95) logic. MM. Bakhtin, who studied traditional grotesque imagery, considered it the embodiment of a festive and cheerful free thought: “The grotesque frees us from all forms of inhuman necessity that permeate the prevailing ideas about the world<...>debunks this necessity as relative and limited; grotesque form helps liberation<...>from walking truths, allows you to look at the world in a new way, feel<...>the possibility of a completely different world order” 2. In the art of the last two centuries, the grotesque, however, often loses its cheerfulness and expresses a total rejection of the world as chaotic, frightening, hostile (Goya and Hoffmann, Kafka and the theater of the absurd, to a large extent Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin).
Art initially contains life-like principles, which made themselves felt in the Bible, classical epics of antiquity, and Plato’s dialogues. In the art of modern times, life-likeness almost dominates (the most striking evidence of this is the realistic narrative prose of the 19th century, especially L.N. Tolstoy and A.P. Chekhov). It is essential for authors who show man in his diversity, and most importantly, who strive to bring what is depicted closer to the reader, to minimize the distance between the characters and the perceiving consciousness. At the same time, in the art of the 19th – 20th centuries. conditional forms were activated (and at the same time updated). Nowadays this is not only traditional hyperbole and grotesque, but also all kinds of fantastic assumptions (“Kholstomer” by L.N. Tolstoy, “Pilgrimage to the Land of the East” by G. Hesse), demonstrative schematization of the depicted (B. Brecht’s plays), exposure of the technique (“ Eugene Onegin” by A.S. Pushkin), effects of montage composition (unmotivated changes in place and time of action, sharp chronological “breaks”, etc.).
-- [ Page 1 ] --
E. N. KOVTUN
Art
in literature
Tutorial
Study guide reviews fantastic literature
context of the development of other types of artistic fiction
la, together constituting a single system of interconnection
known varieties of narration about the extraordinary. At the
to the extent of prose and dramaturgy of Russian, European and American
pre-literary structures - models of reality, characteristic of fantasy, utopia, parables, literary fairy tales and myths;
The features of fiction in satire are explored.
The manual is intended for undergraduate and graduate students studying in the direction and specialty of “Philology” - but it can be useful to anyone who is interested in the general patterns of development of literature or simply reads and loves science fiction.
CONTENTS Preface.................................................. Chapter One THE NATURE OF FICTION AND ITS ARTISTIC TASKS... Advantages of a comprehensive study of fiction. – Semantic levels of the concept “convention”. – Secondary convention and element of the extraordinary. – Origin and historical variability of fiction. – Difficulty in perceiving the extraordinary. – Principles of creating fictional worlds. – Types of narration about the neo-extraordinary. – Preliminary remarks on the functions of fiction.
Chapter Two FANTASY: “THE POTENTIALLY POSSIBLE” IN SF AND “TRUE REALITY” FANTASY ................... Fiction as a basic type of fiction. – Classifications of fiction. – Imperfect terminology. – Prehistory of modern science fiction. – Utopia and social fiction. – Rational fantastic model of reality in the novels “Wreck-It Ralph 124С41+”
H. Gernsbeck, “Plutonia” by V. Obruchev, “Aelita” by A. Tolstoy, “Star Maker” by O. Stapledon. – Specifics of the parcel. – The illusion of certainty. - The hero of a rational fiction work. – Artistic detail in rational fiction. – Tasks and functions of science fiction. – The difference between premises in rational science fiction and fantasy. – Varieties of fantasy. – The artistic world of the novels “Angel of the Western Window” by G. Meyrink, “Maiden Christina”
M. Eliade, “Running on the Waves” by A. Green. – Principles of narrative organization. – Criteria for evaluating a hero. – The meaning of “true reality.” – The functionality of the synthesis of two types of fiction in the “Space Trilogy” by C. S. Lewis.
Chapter Three LITERARY MAGIC TALE AND MYTH: COSMO LOGICAL MODEL OF EXISTENCE........................ Modern approaches to the study of myth and fairy tales. – Formation of the fairy tale genre in European literature XIX–XX centuries - For the disgusting attractiveness of fairy tales. – Semantic core of the concepts “fairy tale” and “myth”. – Forms of manifestation of mythological and fairy tale conventions. – The fairy-tale-mythological model of the world in the epics of T. Mann “Joseph and His Brothers”, J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”, in the stories of P. Travers, in the plays of E. Schwartz and M. Maeterlinck. – Space-time continuum: the relationship between the “historical” and the “eternal.” – Four aspects of the hero’s interpretation. – Archetypal. – “Magical” and “wonderful”
as forms of fiction in fairy tales and myths. – A special way of storytelling.
Chapter Four FICTION AS A MEANS OF SATIRICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ALLEGORATION................................ Content and scope of application of the concepts of “satirical condition” ity" and "philosophical convention". – Subordination of the extraordinary element to the task of comic re-creation of reality.
Fiction as a form of philosophical allegory. - The degree of unusualness. – A satirical rethinking of the canons of rational fiction in V. Mayakovsky’s plays “The Bedbug” and “Bathhouse”. – Comic mythology of A. France (“Penguin Island”). – “Invisible fiction” of the parable (“The Castle” by F. Kafka). – Formalization of the premise in G. Hesse’s novel “The Glass Bead Game.” – Functions of metaphorical imagery in J. P. Sartre’s drama “The Flies.” – Satirical and philosophical-metaphorical models of the world.
Chapter Five SYNTHESIS OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF FICTION IN A WORK OF ART..................................... A unified semantic field of fiction. – Artistic possibilities for synthesizing various types of conventions. – Types of fiction and related layers of content in the novels “The War with the Lamanders” by K. Capek, “The Master and Margarita” by M. Bulgakov, and the story “The Metamorphosis” by F. Kafka. – The mechanism of interaction between different types of narration about the extraordinary. – Multidimensionality of the image. – Overcoming schematism. – Increasing the associative potential of the text.
Chapter six EVOLUTION OF EASTERN EUROPEAN FICTION IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE XX CENTURY AND AT THE TURN OF THE XX-XXI centuries. Narration of the extraordinary in the second half of the twentieth century: evolution and problems of study. – Periodization of post-war Russian and Eastern European fantastic prose. Reasons for the dominance of the NF in the socialist era. – Fate fantasy and changing ratios different types science fiction in the 1970s–1980s. – The role and tasks of fantastic literature under socialism. – Changes in the literary situation in Russia and other countries of Eastern Europe in the first half of the 1990s. – The place of fantastic prose in new cultural paradigms. – Adventure schemes in fiction of rational premise. – Social and philosophical tradition in market conditions. – The rise of fantasy and attempts to create its national variants. – Ironic fantasy. – A fantastic element in “elite” literature. Science fiction and post-modernism. – Social features and expressive possibilities of fan fiction of the second half of the twentieth century - beginning of the XXI centuries
Conclusion................................................... Notes. ........................................... Recommended reading.. ................................ Preface This book is a textbook that partially reproduces the material from the monograph by the same author “Poetry The Story of the Extraordinary: Artistic Worlds of Fantasy, Fairy Tale, Utopia, Parable and Myth,” published in a small edition in 1999. Compared to the previous text, the current one has added a large section on fantasy of the second half of the last century and the turn of the 20th–21st centuries. Changes and additions were also made to other sections, a list of recommended literature was compiled, and other amendments were made that correspond to the genre of the educational publication.
However, the reworking of the text, albeit quite serious, did not violate the original intention: to summarize the results scientific research, covering all options presented in fiction XX century a special type of work, which in this book we will call a narrative about the extraordinary. What are we talking about and what are the objectives of the manual?
The simplest definition of the object of study sounds like this: we are interested in works that contain an element of the extraordinary, that is, telling about something that “does not happen” in modern objective reality or “cannot exist at all.” We are not talking about the unusual as unique, that is, possible under a rare combination of circumstances, but rather about the extraordinary, the non-existent, although, of course, it is sometimes not at all easy to draw the line between the concepts of “impossible” and “incredible”1.
“The unprecedented” and “impossible” interest us regardless of the way it is manifested in the text. It may look like science fiction with its inherent attributes (aliens, robots, time travel), look like a fairy tale (magicians, transformations, talking animals), a mythological drama or novel (the author’s cosmogony disguised as “antiquity”), a utopia (an ideal or terrible world of the future ) etc. The unusual can be presented at any level of the artistic structure of a work - in the plot, in the system of characters, in the form of individual fantastic images and details.
Since the time of A.S. Pushkin, literature has often been likened to a “magic crystal” that transforms reality in accordance with the will of the author. But at the same time, they do not always remember that such a transformation can be equally convincingly and vividly carried out both with the help of artistic images, more or less habitually recreating the appearance of the world, and in forms that change it, giving reality an unrecognizable appearance. In the latter case, various versions of the narration of the extraordinary arise. We can say that this type of work represents the pinnacle verbal creativity: after all, under the artist’s pen, something appears that did not exist in the world before.
Of course, extraordinary phenomena and images found in fiction cannot be considered something fundamentally new, unprecedented and unknown before the book was written.
The human brain is not able to create anything that does not have, albeit indirectly, a connection with reality. “There is no such fiction that would be an absolute product of “creative fantasy” and cannot exist. The most desperate science fiction writer and visionary does not “create” his images, but puts them together, combines them, synthesizes them from real data”2.
So, the creator of a narrative about the extraordinary creates only unusual combinations of familiar realities (we will talk about this in detail in Chapter 1). In addition, he always has the opportunity to rely on inaccurate information, superstitions and prejudices that live in the minds of even the most rationally thinking readers, on the most ancient (even archaic myth) ideas, traditions and legends, as well as on the centuries-old tradition of narrating about extraordinary things. – that is, the worlds and stories created by his predecessors. That is why most fantastic, fairy-tale, mythological, etc. images are so “recognizable”, and many of them turn into cliches over time.
Stories about the extraordinary and supernatural, impossible in principle or still inaccessible to human knowledge at all times, formed an important part of elegant literature, not to mention folklore genres. If you try to trace the history of a narrative of this type, then the list of works will have to start with Homer and Apuleius. A tradition stretching through centuries will cover the works of Ariosto and Dante, T. More and T. Campanella, D. Swift and F. Rabelais, F. Bacon and S. Cyrano de Bergerac, C. Maturin and H. Walpole, O. Balzac and E. Poe, as well as many other famous writers.
Despite the dominance of pragmatism and rationalism, the narrative of the extraordinary is clearly represented in the literature of the recent century. At the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. created epics by T. Mann and J. R. R. Tolkien, novels by A. France, H. Wells, O. Stapledon, K. Capek, A. Tolstoy, A. Conan Doyle, D. London, R. L. Stevenson , B. Stoker, G. Mayrinka, M. Eliade, A. Green, V. Bryusov, M. Bulgakov, utopias of O. Huxley, E. Zamyatin, D. Orwell, parables of G. Hesse, F. Kafka, K. S. Lewis, plays by G. Ibsen, B. Shaw, M. Maeterlinck, L. Andreev, fairy tales by O. Wilde, A. de Saint-Exupéry, Y. Olesha, E. Schwartz, P. Bazhov and many other works, containing an element of the extraordinary.
In the second half of the last century, the traditions of narrating the extraordinary were adopted and developed in the works of many writers belonging to the “elites” of national literatures (Ch. Aitmatov, A. Kim, R. Bach, H. L. Borges, P. Ackroyd, S. Geim). But no less significant is the merit of authors working in certain areas of popular literature, primarily in science fiction (A. Azimov, A. Clark, R. Bradbury, P. Boole, S. King, M. Moorcock, W. Le Guin, I Efremov, A. and B. Strugatsky, L. Soucek, P. Vezhinov, K. Borun, S. Lem). A surge of interest in the extraordinary occurred at the end of the twentieth century. and was associated both with the spread of the philosophy and aesthetics of postmodernism in fiction (D. Fowles, M. Pavic, G. Petrovich, V. Pelevin, M. Weller, V. Sorokin, D. Lipskerov, M. Urban, O. Tokarczuk ), and with a change in the structure of the narrative and the relationship between various types of fiction in the former socialist countries, with the arrival of a new generation of talents (A. Sapkovsky, G. L. Oldi, S. Loginov, E. Lukin, M. Uspensky, etc. .).
However, despite the vividness of the examples taken from the works of the classics, it is not always easy to identify and adequately interpret the element of the unusual in a work of art. The fact is that it can be presented both visually, embodied in extraordinary, magical, supernatural and similar images, and in a hidden form, turning into a kind of “fantastic beginning”, including a special plot premise, specific parameters of action, and sometimes - just a general author’s intention to create a situation that is obviously impossible in reality. The role of the extraordinary element in revealing the author’s intention can also be different – from decisive to secondary.
In addition, the type of narrative under study has its own specifics in each of the literary genres and artistic movements. In the very in general terms turning to the extraordinary is a universal way of depicting the world in literature (and in other forms of art and spheres of culture), equally accessible to artists of all eras and adherents of different aesthetic concepts. But the “extraordinary” in the interpretation of the romantics is not in all respects similar to the “magical” in folk tale and bears little resemblance to the “potentially possible” in the science fiction of realist writers. We can only say with some degree of certainty that there are literary movements that are more sensitive to the extraordinary than others - such as, for example, the above-mentioned romanticism and postmodernism.
In the aesthetics of many philosophical systems and artistic platforms of the twentieth century. (surrealism, absurdity, deconstructivism, etc.) the element of the extraordinary is subordinated to logic basic principles interpretations of existence that distort reality and destroy the traditional structure of the narrative so much that it ceases to be perceived as incredible and impossible. This is a separate interesting area of research, which, due to its specificity, we are forced to leave aside. Our book will examine literary works that contain a sufficiently expressed plot and system of images that reproduce reality at least in relative harmony and completeness. For the same reasons, we will limit ourselves to talking about prose and drama, because the extraordinary in poetry (especially lyrical) has a different - however, still practically unexplored - appearance.
The diversity of forms and a special kind of “elusiveness”, the organic entry into poetics of a variety of literary movements, as well as the historical and national variability of fiction lead to the fact that the narrative of the extraordinary in the unity of all its variants is studied relatively little, because the commonality is obscured in the eyes researchers diversity.
That's why we see our main task as showing:
the most important laws for the creation of fictional worlds are the same, if not for verbal creativity in general, then at least for the artistic thinking of a certain historical era.
The first difficulty on the chosen path is the choice of basic terms with the help of which one can analyze various types of narration about the extraordinary. In Russian literary criticism (namely, in its semantic field, this research was carried out) there seems to be no shortage of definitions related to the sphere of the extraordinary.
However, we have to note with regret the absence of a unified conceptual system that allows us to mutually correlate the terms “fiction”, “conjecture”, “convention”, “fantasy”, “fantastic grotesque” (as well as metaphor, hyperbole, symbol, etc.) and their internal gradations. Moreover, there is no strict definition of the concepts “supernatural”, “wonderful”, “magical”, “magical”, “mystical” in relation to the poetics of a work of art. But there is also, say, “horrible” or “alternative historical” as a designation for the semantic core of some genre varieties of the modern fantasy novel. And it is clear that the terms and definitions “myth” and “mythological prose”, “fairy tale” and “fairy tale”, “science fiction” and “fantasy”, “utopia” and “dystopia” are directly related to the subject under study. “allegory”, “parable”, “novel of disasters”, “novel-warning”, “fan tasmagoria” - and many others. Each of them has unique shades of meaning, but in some area of meaning contains a reference to the element of the extraordinary.
In other words, interpreting “extraordinary” in the system of traditional scientific categories is quite difficult. We believe that this can be done most adequately with the help of three concepts: fantasy, fiction, artistic convention. Unfortunately, none of these terms covers the entire phenomenon of interest to us.
The usual and seemingly most expressive term “fantasy” is, paradoxically, now the most limited in meaning. In the 20th century it turned out to be assigned primarily to a special area of popular literature (and to an independent subculture that goes beyond literary boundaries), combining two types of fantastic storytelling: science fiction and fantasy. Multi-million dollar blockbusters in cinema, virtual worlds computer games and the familiar motley books telling about galactic empires or battles between werewolves and vampires have made us almost forget the broad literary interpretation of the terms “fantasy” and “fantastic”. It has been preserved only in special publications like the “Concise Literary Encyclopedia”: “Fiction is a specific method of depicting life, using an artistic form-image (object, situation, world), in which elements of reality are combined in a way that is not inherent in it in principle - incredibly , “wonderful”, supernatural”3. So today it is possible to talk about “fantastic” as extraordinary in a utopia, parable or literary fairy tale only with some stretch.
The concept of “fiction” also seems successful only at first glance, since it is devoid of unambiguity. Usually, when talking about fiction, they mean one of two or even three meanings of the term. In the first, most common case, fiction is interpreted very broadly: as the most essential, institutional feature of fiction - the subjective recreation of reality by the writer and a figurative form of knowledge of the world. In the "Concise Literary Encyclopedia"
we read: “Fiction is one of the main points of literary artistic creativity“, consisting in the fact that the writer, based on real reality, creates new, artistic facts... The writer, using real private facts, usually combines them into a new “fictional” whole”4.
In this meaning, the term “fiction” characterizes the content of any work of art as a product of the author’s imagination. After all, in the end, even a realistic novel or essay contains a fair amount of fiction. All types of art rely on conscious invention, and this distinguishes them, on the one hand, from science, and on the other, from religious teachings. The famous Pushkin phrase: “I will shed tears over fiction” refers us precisely to given value term.
A variant of the first meaning or the second independent meaning of the concept “fiction” can be considered the principle of constructing works traditionally classified as “mass” literature, deliberately condensing and sharpening the course of events characteristic of everyday reality - adventure-adventure, love-melodramatic, detective novels, etc. . 5 There is no impossible as such, but there is the incredible - at least in the form of coincidences, coincidences, concentration of the vicissitudes of fate that befall the hero. In relation to such texts, the term “fiction”
means “fiction”, “fable”, “fantasy” (as opposed to fantasy as the basis of art).
As a synonym for the concepts “fantastic”, “extraordinary” and “wonderful”, the word “fiction” is used much less often. Although the same “Brief literary encyclopedia" admits:
“By creating a fact that could naturally happen, the writer is able to reveal to us the “possibilities” inherent in life, the hidden tendencies of its development. Sometimes this requires such fiction... which goes beyond the boundaries of “plausibility” and gives rise to fantastic artistic facts...”6.
The term “artistic convention” should apparently be recognized as the most “strict” of those discussed. Its codification domestic science I devoted several decades to literature. In the 1960s–1970s. a distinction was made between the primary conventions characterizing the figurative nature of art (analogous to the broad meaning of the term “fiction”), as well as a set of expressive means inherent different types art, and a secondary convention, denoting a deliberate deviation by the writer from literal verisimilitude.
True, the boundaries of such a retreat would not have been established. As a result, within the framework of the concept of “secondary convention” there were allegory and fairy tale, metaphor and grotesque, satirical point and fantastic premise, so different in “degree of improbability”. There was no more or less clear distinction between “any violation of the logic of reality” and “an element of extraordinary, obvious fiction, fantasy.” Thus, our understanding of secondary convention as an element of the extraordinary is somewhat more local than the generally accepted meaning of the term.
The concepts of “convention” and “secondary convention,” which, unfortunately, are not free from the ideological dogmas of the era that gave birth to them, have at least one undoubted advantage: they allow one to include in the scope of research the entire set of options for the narration of the extraordinary. This is why the term “convention” becomes basic for us. But, of course, we do not abandon the concepts of “fiction” and “fantastic”, using them in a narrow sense - as synonyms for the element of the extraordinary. We will explain all this in more detail in Chapter 1.
In domestic (and foreign, as far as we can judge) literary criticism of the twentieth century. Two factually independent traditions of studying the narrative of the extraordinary have emerged. The first is characterized by an interest in convention (its incomplete Western analogue can be considered the concept of fiction7) as a philosophical and aesthetic category, considered among the most general theoretical concepts(artistic image, display and re-creation of reality in literary work and so on.). The second tradition is a set of works that explore the artistic specificity of the extraordinary as an integral part of the poetics of various genres and areas of literature: science fiction and fantasy, literary fairy tales and myths, as well as parables, utopias, satires.
We will provide a review of critical literature of both the first and second types in the corresponding chapters of this book.
In our work, an attempt is made to combine these traditions and analyze the narrative of the extraordinary in the unity of its various manifestations in a literary text.
The second difficulty of the ongoing research is related to the need to resolve the issue of classifying the types of narration about the extraordinary. We consider it possible to identify six independent types of artistic conventions: rational (science) fiction and fantasy (fantasy), fairy tale, mythological, satirical and philosophical conventions, more or less associated with the genre structures of a literary fairy tale, utopia, parable, mythological , fantastic, satirical novel, etc.8 The criteria for identifying and the specifics of each type will be justified in detail in Chapters 2, 3 and 4.
However, our task is not only to identify substantive and artistic differences between personal options stories about the extraordinary. We intend to show that, along with quite numerous examples of relatively “pure” use by writers of one or another type of secondary convention, no less often one can find cases of combination and reinterpretation in a work of artistic principles and semantic associations characteristic of different types of fiction. Based on this, we consider it possible to talk about a unified system of interrelated types and forms artistic convention in relation to the literature of the twentieth century, which confirms the relationship of all types with each other.
The third difficulty lies in developing principles for analyzing various options stories about the extraordinary. It is easy to understand that it is impossible to finally and irrevocably separate, say, dystopia from science fiction or fantasy from a literary fairy tale. In some cases, one can interpret fiction in different ways and even argue about whether it is present at all (“The Castle” by F. Kafka, “The City of Great Fear” by J. Ray, “Lame Fate” by A. and B. Strugatsky). However, each type of convention that determines the appearance of the extraordinary for a particular group of works is easily recognized by both readers and critics.
Any person ignorant of the science of literature, even if he is indifferent or unkind to a story about the extraordinary, as a rule, is able to determine from the very first pages of an unfamiliar book what exactly is in front of him: fantasy, utopia, parable, fairy tale or myth .
How does this distinction occur? It would be logical to assume that it is based on a unique set of artistic means that each type of fiction has at its disposal. However, this hypothesis is hardly true. After all, the same principles for re-creating reality, not to mention specific techniques, images and details, can be used with equal success by different types of narration about the extraordinary. For example, “wonderful” heroes can be found in fantasy, fairy tales, myth, satire, and even science fiction. However, in each of these genres and areas of literature they will acquire their own motivation and functions.
For example, having unusual abilities a person in science fiction will take the form of a scientist who discovered the effect of invisibility (“The Invisible Man” by H. Wells), the creator of a new weapon (“Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” by A. Tolstoy) or the victim of a scientific experiment (“Amphibian Man” by A. Bel Eva), and in fantasy he will become a sorcerer possessing secret knowledge (“A Wizard of Earthsea” by W. Le Guin), or a romantic soaring on the wings of a dream (“The Glittering World” by A. Green). An unusual enemy or assistant, depending on the type of fiction, will turn out to be a robot (“Frankenstein” by M. Shelley), an alien (“Who are you?” by D. Campbell), a vampire (“Count Dracula”
B. Stoker), talking animals (“The Chronicles of Narnia” by C. S. Lewis), an animate object (“The Blue Bird” by M. Maeterlin). The formula for controlling the elements will be embodied in the form of a mathematical equation, a magic spell, a child’s counting... Various types of narration about the extraordinary can freely exchange images and characters, rethinking the “supernatural” in the spirit of a rational-fantastic hypothesis, philosophical allegory, etc.
Consequently, the specificity of individual types of narration about the extraordinary can be revealed not at the level of individual techniques or even a set of visual means, but only by taking into account the unity of the substantive and formal aspects of the work. A conclusion about whether a text belongs to a certain type of narration about the extraordinary can be made only on the basis of an analysis that reveals the purpose and method of using fiction and the features of the picture of the world created by the writer. In other words, it is necessary to consider holistic models of reality generated by various types of convention. Only such an analysis is capable of showing what facts and signs of real life the author uses to depict the fictional world, how he reinterprets these facts, giving them an extraordinary appearance;
and most importantly - why this rethinking is happening, what topics it allows to touch upon, what questions to pose.
We will study the content and artistic specificity of each type of narration about the extraordinary in a certain sequence of aspects. First of all, we will pay attention to the features of the premise (the assumption that forms the plot that extraordinary events happened or could happen “in reality”), its motivation (how does the author justify the appearance of the extraordinary and is it justified at all), the forms of expression of the extraordinary (“ miraculous" in fantasy, "magical" in a fairy tale, "magical" in myth, "potentially possible" in rational fiction, etc.), features of the figurative system;
space-time continuum in which the action takes place (and its “material”
design with the help of extraordinary objects and details), and, finally, the tasks and functions of a specific type of fiction. We strive to ensure that our research leads to the creation of " collective images", kind " verbal portraits» fiction in various genres and areas of fiction.
The chosen principle—the analysis of models of reality created by various types of convention—determines the structure of the book. It consists of six chapters. In the first, we summarize the study of the problem of artistic convention in Russian literary criticism over the past half century and present the gradation of meanings of the term “convention” that we have developed. Here, issues related to the origin and historical variability of literary fiction are discussed, the principles of creating extraordinary images and worlds are formulated, and there is a conversation about the differences between authors who actively use fiction and those who do not.
The second, third and fourth chapters are devoted to the consideration of individual types of convention, and the closest types, for which, in our opinion, the similarities are more important than the differences (rational fiction and fantasy, fairy tale and myth, satirical and philosophical convention), are combined within one chapter .
Our analysis is carried out mainly on the material of European literature of the first half of the twentieth century. We consider European literature as a single space in which, despite the undeniable national specificity, general trends in the development of narration about the extraordinary operate. We consider it possible to include the literature of the USA and Russia in the last century to this same space.
First half of the twentieth century. was chosen because it represents the era of the most vivid functioning of the system of interrelated types of convention that interests us. First of all, these years are the “golden age” of scientific (especially social-philosophical) fiction. K. Chapek, O. Stapledon, A. Tolstoy turn to it, and a generation of “classics of the genre” comes to American science fiction - A. Azimov, G. Kuttner, K. Simak, R. Heinlein, T. Sturgeon. At the same time, a new race is experiencing fantasy (H. Meyrink, H. Lovecraft, H. H. Evers, M. Eliade).
During this period, interest in fairy tales was also revived. Its artistic principles are used by representatives of a variety of movements - from O. Wilde, M. Maeterlinck and Russian symbolists to S. Lagerlöf, E. Schwartz, P. Travers.
The mythological novel is formed as an independent genre variety, connecting, on the one hand, with the tradition of “heroic” fantasy (J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis), and on the other, with philosophical prose and parable (T. Mann).
Philosophical convention clearly manifests itself in drama (B. Shaw, B. Brecht, K. Chapek). A new type of utopia is emerging (E. Zamyatin, O. Huxley), in which the previous principle of a consistent author’s story about an ideal world is replaced by a dynamic narrative determined by a rational-fantastic premise. Thus, it was the first half of the twentieth century. becomes the era of the formation of artistic “canons” for many areas of modern literature related to fiction.
In principle, the proposed classification is correct for the literature of the 19th–20th centuries (and most fully for the 1890–1950s). But in the nineteenth century. The system we postulated was still in its infancy. In turn, the completion of its formation in the middle of our century in no way ensured its stability, and already the second half of the century introduced significant adjustments to our classification.
The most striking and memorable type of “explicit” fiction in literature of at least the last three centuries remains, undoubtedly, fantasy. That is why in our book it is given special attention Special attention. Chapter 2 describes the two main types of fantastic prose and drama of the twentieth century: science fiction and fantasy. Using these familiar definitions, we subject them to certain adjustments.
Firstly, we prefer the less common concept of “rational fiction” (RF) to the term “science fiction” (SF), which emphasizes the specificity of the premise and the special worldview inherent in this group of works (the logical motivation for the fantastic assumption in the text). On the history of origin, codification and semantic contradictions that arise when using the term “science fiction”
applied to modern literature, we will discuss in detail in chapters 2 and 6.
Secondly, our understanding of fantasy is also somewhat different from the generally accepted one. In the second chapter we will explain that this term in our work describes works in which the motivation of the premise, as a rule, is removed outside the text and, based on the principles of mythological thinking, constructs a special model of the world, which we designate as “true reality” . In Russian literary criticism, due to the historical peculiarities of its development, a special term denoting this type of fiction never appeared. That's why, when last decades of the past century in Russian and Eastern European literary space a steady interest arose in this type of narration about the extraordinary; the corresponding definition (fantasy, fantasy) was borrowed from the Anglo-American scientific tradition.
Over time, however, both in the West and in the East, the initial broad understanding of fantasy as "the literature of the magical, supernatural, magical and inexplicable"
narrowed in the mass consciousness to the designation of the genre of “commercial” stories and novels telling about local fictional worlds with a conditionally medieval magical “decor”. A huge number of the same type of works about modest but courageous heroes overcoming the obstacles of an imaginary universe in search of a magical artifact or the source of absolute Evil has crowded out the once equally numerous science fiction texts from the memory of readers and for a new generation of science fiction fans has become almost the only option for storytelling about the extraordinary.
Such literature is now so widespread that the delimitation of the sphere of the fantastic on the Russian (and Czech, and Polish, etc.) book market in last years looks not like “science fiction” and “fantasy”, but like “fantasy” and “fantasy” (we will discuss the reasons in Chapter 6). However, the paradox is that “fantasy” today actually means only one of the variants of the original meaning of the term - the so-called “heroic fantasy”, or “fantasy of sword and sorcery” (we will talk about this in more detail in Chapter 2).
Russification of the English-language term has not yet been completed.
IN different sources the concept of “fantasy” is used both in the feminine and neuter gender, and even in different graphic versions (fantasy, fantasy, etc.). That's why we prefer to do without transliteration. Graphics have a terminological meaning for us. Where the spelling “fantasy” appears in this book, we are talking, in accordance with our concept, about a special type of convention that uses a fantastic (but not fairy-tale or mythological!) premise without logical motivation in the text. The spelling “fantasy” is retained in quotes or when denoting current publishing realities.
The fifth chapter of the manual deals with the synthesis of different types of conventions in a literary text. We try to show that this synthesis gives rise to a special content and structural complexity of the works, which is their main advantage. Simultaneous use artistic principles fantasy, fairy tales, parables, etc. leads to the mutual imposition of corresponding models of reality and to the multiplication of associations, which, in turn, gives rise to an endless play of meanings and creates the possibility of ever new interpretations of the author’s concept.
In the final sixth chapter, we return to the conversation about science fiction – but in the chronological coordinates of the second half of the twentieth century and the turn of the 20th–21st centuries. Such a return is due to the desire to trace the evolution of the system of interconnected types and forms of secondary convention that we postulate beyond the boundaries of the historical era within which it was formed. It is advisable to start a conversation about evolution with the most obvious changes, and they occurred in the second half of the last century precisely in the sphere of science fiction and the fantastic.
In this chapter we will find out under what conditions and under the influence of what ideological concepts the post-war science fiction of the USSR and other socialist countries developed, gaining increasing popularity, but at the same time losing the novelty of the problematic and the diversity of artistic structure. We are trying to trace in what directions the most gifted authors sought a way out of the crisis that engulfed narrowly interpreted science fiction literature. Let us explain how the fantasy tradition was latently born in the space described. Finally, we will show how, under the influence of political, economic and cultural changes in the post-socialist literary space of Russia and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. A new reader demand is being formed and the patterns of creation and functioning of literary texts are being built differently. Science fiction becomes a mirror of these processes, accumulating the most striking, and therefore often controversial and dramatic features of the era. We will talk about the commercialization of fantastic prose, the not always favorable influence of Western book products, and the laws of the market, which places strict demands on the content and poetics of fantastic works.
Considerable difficulties in the study of fiction are caused by the selection of texts that demonstrate the characteristics of certain types of narration about the extraordinary. Of course, it is impossible not only to consider, but even to simply mention all the works created in the twentieth century and containing an element of the extraordinary.
That is why we will rely mainly on the best examples of world prose and drama, in which convention becomes the main means of realizing the author’s intention. However, in addition to this, the book will also mention works that do not belong to the number of indisputable masterpieces, but clearly characterize one or another type of fiction. At the same time (with the exception of Chapter 6, in which such a conversation becomes inevitable due to the specifics of the modern literary situation), we deliberately avoid dividing the studied corpus of texts into “serious” literature and “mass” genres, leaving aside the problems of fiction being in the declared by many researchers of the literary-critical “ghetto”. Our task is to prove: there are no “massive” types of fiction unworthy of the attention of serious researchers. The semantic and aesthetic level of a literary text containing “obvious” fiction, like all others, depends only on the talent and goals of the writer.
This manual is intended for students, undergraduates and graduate students studying in the direction and specialty “Philology”, as well as, taking into account the “interdisciplinary” nature of the sphere of manifestation of the extraordinary in modern culture, and for other specialists in the field of the humanities and non-humanities. The material presented in the manual can be used when teaching courses on the history of domestic and foreign literature, as well as theoretical literary disciplines.
Finally, this book will be of interest to everyone who reads and loves science fiction, who, regardless of age and type of occupation, maintains an interest in the fairy-tale and mythological interpretation of existence, has a penchant for thought experiments in the spaces of non-existent worlds and never tires of asking themselves questions about the meaning of human existence in an endless and continuously changing world.
We hope that reading this book will help:
– understand the important role that “explicit” fiction (narrative of the extraordinary) plays in the literature of the twentieth century, as well as previous eras;
– to understand the terminological disputes that have been going on for many decades by representatives of scientific schools and traditions involved in the study of various types of narration about the extraordinary and related genres;
– to navigate the diverse and colorful world of the fantastic subculture that is so popular and rapidly expanding today;
– take a fresh look at the literary process in Russia, Europe and America from spheres traditionally considered marginal (fiction, fairy-tale prose, etc.), but nevertheless revealing the evolution artistic structures no less (and sometimes more vividly) than the leading genres and main trends;
– expand theoretical and literary knowledge and horizons by becoming familiar with fantasy studies as a special branch of the science of literature, as well as with a detailed interpretation of its basic terms “fiction”, “artistic convention”, “artistic image” and the principles of depicting reality in a work of art.
We are fully aware of the difficulty of the tasks we have undertaken, the breadth of the problem, and the substantive and structural heterogeneity of the material chosen for analysis. However, without claiming exhaustive answers, we are still convinced: the proposed concept, and most importantly, the interpretation of the narrative of the extraordinary as a single aesthetic phenomenon can bring us closer to understanding the nature of artistic fiction - a unique phenomenon that constitutes the essence and main decoration of verbal creativity.
Chapter One THE NATURE OF FICTION AND ITS ARTISTIC TASKS Advantages of a comprehensive study of fiction.
Semantic levels of the concept “convention”.
Secondary convention and the element of the extraordinary.
The origin and historical variability of fiction.
Difficulty in perceiving the extraordinary.
Principles for creating fictional worlds.
Types of narration about the extraordinary.
Preliminary remarks on the functions of fiction.
The artist is a lucky man. He is able to give those around him the world as he sees it himself. A science fiction artist is doubly lucky. His mind's eye sees what is inaccessible to anyone in the world, sees it as so real and material that it can show everyone. His fantasy opens up extraordinary worlds - bright and menacing, scary and joyful, inaccessible, but already conquered by the human imagination.
A. and B. Strugatsky Advantages of a comprehensive study of fiction. Interest in problems and discussions related to the concepts of “fiction” and “artistic convention” once began for us with the question: why do many readers not like science fiction? The author of these lines more than once had to face bewilderment, condescending disdain, and, finally, conscious rejection of fantastic works as “boring,” “childish,” “primitive,” and “low-artistic.” Let us make a reservation right away: we are far from the idea of defending the aesthetic value of all fantastic texts.
Like any literature, science fiction can be good and bad.
This book will focus mainly on the second.
Studying the reasons for likes and dislikes for science fiction led us to the understanding that the problem is by no means limited to it alone. We are talking about the peculiarities of perception by different groups of people of any literary texts, the plots and images of which are distinguished by a certain unusualness, or rather, unusualness. What is meant? These images and plots in the minds of readers are correlated not with real or “potentially real”, i.e., in principle, facts that can be discovered and events that can happen, but only with some generalized ideas about the sphere of the possible or impossible - and also with the fact that has already been invented and told or described by someone.
Extraordinary characters and plots can have very different appearances. They can rely on the ancient archetypes existing in the human consciousness and trace their origins to archaic myth (doubles, the living dead, nightmarish monsters and personified fears in the short stories of E. Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, F. Kafka or the novels of S. King), but are also capable of becoming, like the images of science fiction, a product of modernity (travel to the stars in the books of A. Asimov, A. Clark or S. Lem, communist utopia in the novels of I. Efremov, etc.). The “degree of unusualness” can also be different. Fiction and literary fairy tales “know” undoubted miracles. But a parable or a utopia of the classical type is difficult to convict of “obvious extraordinaryness”, however, in the minds of readers they somehow correlate, if not with the concept of “fantasy”, then with the sphere of the “hypothetical”
or “impossible in reality.”
Nevertheless, the patterns of perception of such texts and opinions about them among different people are approximately the same. They were expressed in the clearest form by one of the author’s casual interlocutors, who said with sincere bewilderment: “I don’t understand how you can read about something that doesn’t actually happen?”
The question is clear and logical: why waste time thinking about something that will never, under any circumstances, be encountered in life? The answer is not so simple. It usually takes considerable effort to explain that works that tell about the extraordinary also introduce the reader to reality, but they do so in a special form. This is how M. Arnaudov reveals this paradox: “We... discover in... a fictional world psychological realism, capable of reconciling us with phantasmagoria... If we come to terms with conventions from the very beginning, then we will only have to wonder how in this world of the strange and incredible the principles of humanity are preserved and how everything happens due to the same fundamental laws that observation reveals reality"9.
We will return to explaining the possibilities and advantages of such a narrative about the extraordinary in the future.
So, the problem lies in the peculiarities of different people’s perception of the “impossible” and “unreal”, i.e. “deliberately invented”, “fantasized”, “obviously fictional” in its most diverse manifestations in a work of art. But what is it? How to define and interpret such phenomena in more or less generally accepted scientific categories?
The concepts of fiction and fantasy are so common and familiar that it would seem that it would not be difficult to explain the processes behind them. However, the explanation is unlikely to be comprehensive and accurate: these words have too many “everyday” shades of meaning. And these shades are not always positive. Almost more often than with the awareness of the power of the imagination, which stimulates a person’s creative activity, they turn out to be associated with ideas about aimless pastime, empty and unnecessary dreams, “fantasizing,” deception, etc. Thus, although the concept of “fiction” and “fantasy” can be used in a conversation on a topic that interests us, relying on them without providing clarifications (“obvious” thought, fantasy as the creation of the extraordinary) and operating only with them is hardly advisable.
That is why, from our point of view, the need for choice and justification is obvious special term, free from “ordinary” connotations, to indicate the writer’s clear departure in the text of the work beyond the limits of what is possible in reality. The need to stage is also obvious common problem the formation and functioning of fiction as an element of the unusual.
The latter is necessary first of all and mainly for the study of areas of literature and genre structures related to fiction, such as science fiction (SF and fantasy) and satire (more precisely, that part of it where the grotesque clearly goes beyond what is acceptable in life), utopia, parable , as well as fairy tales and myths in their modern literary forms.
Traditionally, fiction is studied mainly in its particular manifestations in certain areas of literature and genres or in the works of certain writers10. Number of comparative studies on search general principles the creation of fictional images and plots in various areas of literature, unfortunately, is small11. At the same time, the idea of the structural commonality of all varieties of fiction is latently present even in works devoted to their most decisive demarcation.
Tangible and sometimes insurmountable difficulties arise when trying to distinguish science fiction into a special “type of literature” (we will dwell on this in detail in Chapter 2), when distinguishing between such genre structures as a fantastic (related to fantasy) story and a fairy tale, as well as fairy tale and myth, utopia and dystopia in their modern versions and a science fiction novel. Most often, interesting and significant results of research in the field of individual genre structures associated with fiction serve as an argument in favor of the genetic kinship and artistic unity of all varieties of literary fiction with an infinite variety of its specific embodiments in works - and therefore, confirmation of the need for a comprehensive, systemic its consideration.
Another clear proof of this was the publication of the first volume of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1995).
Its editor Vl. Gakov explains in the preface the principle of selection of material: “The abbreviation NF adopted in the Encyclopedia, which irritates many critics, means... simply that wide and polysemantic layer of modern literature - along with all its historical roots and intersections with other branches of the literary “tree”, which, without long words, is understandable primarily to its readers... The last thing I would like to do is create an “encyclopedia for fans” who can, without hesitation, list all twenty to forty novels of some SF series, but have not even heard of the fiction of Kafka, Golding or Borges...”12 (emphasis added – E.K.). Thus, the book entitled “Encyclopedia of Fantasy” with a declared appeal to SF (science fiction) included Kafka, Borges, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky. Is this not evidence of an understanding of the kinship of numerous varieties of narration about the extraordinary?
Of course, it would be incorrect to say that the fact of such a relationship has so far completely eluded the attention of researchers. In parallel with the study of certain types of fiction, from about the end of the 1950s. In Russian literary criticism, attempts are regularly made to analyze the role of fantasy and imagination in art, to reveal the mechanism of their action and to show the variety of artistic forms they create. Over the years, representatives of many other fields of science bordering on literary studies have also been involved in work in this direction: philosophy and history, aesthetics and art history, cultural studies and theater studies, folkloristics and classical philology.
As we stated in the preface to this book, it seems to us that the most functional - primarily in terms of combining a whole range of meanings, from the broadest (the artist’s fantasy) to the narrowest (a fantastic premise of a certain type) - is the one that has been polished in the course of many years of discussions. and the term artistic convention, codified in the main areas of use. What does this term mean and what shades of meaning does it combine?
Semantic levels of the concept “convention”. The choice of term was made on the basis of the generally accepted meanings of the concepts “convention” and “conditional”. In the “Russian Language Dictionary” we read:
“Conventional –... not existing in reality, imaginary, assumed mentally;
giving artistic image techniques adopted in this type of art...” Of course, the problem of a specific subjective reflection of reality in art, which allows the artist sometimes not to take into account literal verisimilitude, has been discussed for a long time, almost since antiquity. In the past, judgments that preceded the current concepts of artistic conventions were expressed more than once.
Thus, S. T. Coleridge in Chapter XIII of “Literary Biography”
speaks of “primary” and “secondary” imagination. A. de Vigny, in the preface to the novel “Saint-Mars,” reflects on the differences between “truth of fact” and “truth of art.” “Art,” he writes, “can only be considered in its connection with the ideal of beauty... The truth of life is secondary here, moreover, art embellishes itself with fiction... Art could do without it, because that truth, with which it must be imbued lies in the accuracy of observations of human nature, and not in the authenticity of facts...” 14. Finally, V. Belinsky in the article “On the Russian story and the stories of Mr. Gogol (“Arabesques” and “The World City” )" talks about two types of poetry: "Poetry, so to speak, in two ways embraces and reproduces the phenomena of life.
These methods are opposite to one another, although they lead to the same goal. The poet either recreates life according to his own ideal, depending on the image of his views on things, on his relationship to the world, to the age and people in which he lives, or he reproduces it in all its completeness and truth, remaining faithful to all the details, colors and shades... Therefore, poetry can be divided into two, so to speak, sections - ideal and real”15.
And yet, the most significant attempts to determine the content of the term “conventionality” and, accordingly, to build a typology of conventional forms were made in the 1960–1970s.
In the late 1950s and 1960s. A number of discussions were held in the Soviet periodical press, on the one hand, about the problems of “documentary fiction” (“Problems of Literature,” “Foreign Literature,” 1966), on the other hand, about conventions in art (“Soviet Culture ", 1958–59;
"Te atr", 1959;
"Art", 1961;
"Questions of Aesthetics", 1962;
"Ok October", 1963). As a result, the conceptual paradigms “fact – speculation – invention” and “primary – secondary artistic convention” were built, albeit not quite clearly.
Initially, the recognition of the importance of fiction for realistic art was perceived as a very bold statement. In order to bring the positions of his opponents and supporters closer together, a compromise was developed over time. The participants in the discussions agreed that “in contrast to the aesthetic conventions, the conventions of the formalist theater (later this thesis was extended to other types of art. - E.K.), modernist, decadent and, thus, anti-national theater exists and should there is a realistic convention... a progressive and folk convention,” and it is “this convention that is organically included in the broad understanding of realism”16.
The distinction between “realistic” and “modernist” conventions - without a strict definition of both concepts, but with clearly defined evaluative accents - existed in Russian literary criticism almost until the beginning of the 1980s. And only gradually the now seemingly obvious idea was formed that the functionality of conventional forms is determined not by their immanent belonging to “progressive” or “reactionary”, but by the author’s intention and, indirectly, the type of art and the time of creation of the work.
The deliberate distinction between “realistic” and “modernist” conventions became possible also because convention was for a long time considered an attribute (or prerogative) of aesthetics of only some literary movements, for example romanticism, modernism or avant-garde. It took a lot of time to figure out: for all the “tendency” of the aesthetic concepts of these movements to interpret reality in specific, sometimes bizarre and even fantastic forms, artistic fiction cannot be considered the property of any one “ creative method”, since it is equally accessible to everyone.
Having confirmed the legitimacy of the use of conventional forms in art, including realistic art, literary scholars finally had the opportunity to move on to the essence of the matter - to defining the meaning of the term “conventionality”.
Philosophers and art historians took the initiative at this stage of research. In the works of F. Martynov, G. Apresyan, T. Askarov, B. Beilin17 and others, the connection of convention as an aesthetic phenomenon with the basic laws of human thinking was clarified (albeit with inevitable reliance on the works of the classics of Marxism-Leninism).
In particular, it was shown that fiction owes its existence mainly to two aspects of the cognitive process. On the one hand, there is the inevitable inaccuracy, subjectivity and generality of the ideas about objective reality. On the other hand, the ability of the human brain to arbitrarily combine the elements of these ideas, creating combinations unusual for reality.
In the 1970s Attempts to distinguish between the semantic shades of the concept of “convention”, which is truly polysemantic and differently interpreted by researchers, continued. "In our theoretical literature“,” noted A. Mikhailova, “it can be found in the following meanings: as a synonym for untruth, a schema of tism in art;
as a synonym for dead, outdated, but widespread techniques in art (stamps);
as a characteristic of the non-identity of the image with the subject of reflection;
as a definition of a special method of artistic generalization”18.
It was logical to begin delimiting the meanings of the term by posing the most ambitious problem - about convention as a specificity of the artistic image and the figurative type of thinking that underlies art. At this stage of research, to denote the figurative nature of art, which always requires the author’s subjective-emotional rethinking of reality, a clarifying concept of primary convention appeared.
With fiction in the narrower sense of the word (refusal to directly follow in the narrative real forms and logic of events) the concept of secondary convention was correlated. According to the Concise Literary Encyclopedia, a secondary convention is “an image that differs from life-likeness, a way of creating such images;
the principle of artistic representation is a conscious, demonstrative retreat from life’s dissimilarity”19.
Such a basic distinction between two fundamentally different, but nevertheless genetically related meanings of the term “convention” is preserved in Russian literary studies to this day. Over time, however, it became clear that between them - as well as outside them - there is still whole line important semantic shades.
These shades are very important for the concept of unity and interconnection of various types of narration about the extraordinary that we are developing. However, we were never able to find works in which the term “convention” would be considered with sufficient completeness in the totality of its constituent meanings.
That is why we were forced to build our own hierarchy of meanings of the concept of “conventionality,” reflecting the modern level of understanding of this issue.
HIERARCHY OF MEANINGS OF THE CONCEPT “CONVENTIONALITY”
(P – primary, B – secondary artistic convention) 1. The artist as a representative species homo P(0). The relativity of sapiens, like every person, has a way of creating a specific idea in his consciousness of the represented historical era about objective reality, which already has an objective reality that gives a certain degree of conventionality.
(subjectivity).
2. The artist as a historical person who shares, albeit unconsciously, the philosophical, ethical, aesthetic and other attitudes of his era, which can be perceived as conventional from the point of view of other eras.
3. The artist as a creative person who creates an individual concept of existence, which, when perceiving a work of art, is correlated by the reader (viewer, listener) with his own and generally accepted concept.
Subjective concentrated emotion P (1). Figurative formal reproduction of reality in the production of cognition of the world, which lies under the control;
the interaction of the typical and indie is at the heart of art, including the visual, “real” and “invented in the artistic form” in the artistic image, due to this literature.
possessing an undoubted convention.
For literature - the word, for music - sound, P (2). Specific to the theater is a combination of speech, action, a musical system of means of expression, language, dance, etc. The limited means of expressiveness make the expression of reality in a work of art very conditional for each type.
arts (not everything can be depicted on stage, drawn, or conveyed in words).
1. The set of philosophical and aesthetic norms P (3). The normativity of this type of literature (ancient, middle (sustainable, specific age-old, etc.), formed as a result of the visual interaction of the needs of the era and literary means) of the literary tradition. National, regional trends, styles, naya, etc. specificity of literature.
practical principles and 2. Norms of literary direction, type, ways of reflecting the genre.
ality in art 3. Separate artistic techniques (retro work.
specialization, montage, “stream of consciousness”, impersonal direct speech, “mask”, various forms of allusions, intertextuality, etc.).
4. Hyperbole, exaggeration, metaphor, symbol, grotesque (non-fantastic) and other ways of creating artistic images that shift real proportions and change the usual appearance of phenomena, but do not cross the boundaries of obvious fiction.
1. For models of reality created from B. Using the principle of “obvious” fiction, all the previous levels that are legally impossible in number are true (in reality situations, the ric convention in such texts as “obvious” fiction (else superimposed on the primary one) .
extraordinary ment).
2. Secondary convention is largely determined by its own literary tradition(for example, fiction in a fairy tale).
3. Secondary convention is a product of a special author’s concept that interprets the world in fantastic forms that do not have direct equivalents in reality.
Let's comment on the table. If we try to identify the common basis of all currently existing definitions of artistic convention, then such a basis will be a statement of the relative, incomplete (intentionally inadequate) correspondence to reality of certain forms of its reflection in art. This meaning, apparently, should be considered basic for the concept of “convention” in literary and art criticism. But this meaning is by no means limited to the sphere of art. It is no less true for other areas of human activity (norms and cliches in science, religious dogmas, conventions in relationships, behavior, and everyday life).
In other words, the conventionality - or relativity - of human ideas about the world must be taken into account even before posing the question of the general specificity of art. Accordingly, the epithet “artistic” when applied to the concept of “convention” at this level of interpretation does not seem entirely correct, and in our table this level has an index of “0”. Writers, sculptors, artists are, first of all, people, intelligent beings capable of perceiving and understanding the world;
this awareness in itself is conditional due to the limitations of human thinking.
Growing up and developing, human consciousness goes through many stages, at each of which ideas about the world can differ significantly from the previous ones. In the social practice of mankind, there are different eras with their characteristic economic structures, forms of life, morality, religion, etc. Being a contemporary of a particular historical era, the artist, albeit unconsciously, cannot help but be influenced by its attitudes, and therefore reflects in his work the views inherent in it . The degree of conventionality, relativity, and non-identity of his creations with objective reality thereby increases significantly.
Being a creative person, and therefore more capable than others of independent analysis and original interpretation of facts, the artist, as a rule, creates and embodies in his works a uniquely individual concept of existence. The more original (and the more clearly expressed) this concept, the higher ultimately our assessment of the author’s talent, the stronger the charm of his view of the world affects us. “When a critic talks about realism,” notes A. Maurois, “it seems that he is convinced of the existence of absolute reality. It is enough to explore this reality - and the world will be drawn in its entirety. In reality, everything is completely different. Tolstoy’s reality differs from Dostoevsky’s reality, Balzac’s reality differs from Proust’s reality”20. “The most important thing,” M. Guyot also emphasizes, “is a personal point of view, the angle from which the visible world appears to us... To be an artist means to see from a certain perspective and, therefore, to have the center of an internal and original perspective”21 .
“Under the conditions of human practice,” F. Asmus sums up what was said above, ““fixing a fact” does not at all mean “presenting this fact as it is.” Being a concrete practical action, any “fixation of a fact” presupposes not only the bare presence of what is happening, the bare givenness, but also a certain perspective, scale, point of view for selecting what is being recorded and for delimiting it from all related things and processes with which what is being fixed dialectically connected"22.
But, recognizing the artist’s right to a personal interpretation of existence, we, willy-nilly, must recognize a similar right for the reader (listener, viewer). Accordingly, in the process of perceiving a work of art, there is interaction, and sometimes mutual rejection of such concepts. A discrepancy between the worldviews of the author and the reader is possible, for example, when reading works created in the distant past. The author’s interpretation of certain features of reality can be perceived as a convention, a tribute to the era, a reflection on obvious and simplified, from the current point of view, ideas about the universe, etc.
But not only is the writer’s view of the world subjective, i.e.
conditional, it is also expressed using artistic means, i.e. in figurative form (level one in the table). This is what is designated by the term “primary convention.” The author's fiction is invariably present even in the so-called “documentary prose.” As A. Agranovsky notes about himself and his fellow documentary filmmakers, “in the end, we always “invent” our heroes. Even with the most honest and scrupulous adherence to the facts. Because, in addition to the facts, there is an understanding of them, there is a selection, there is a tendency, there is the point of view of the author”23.
The concept of primary convention is practically identical in meaning to the broadest interpretation of the term “fiction”.
It is this kind of fiction, which forms the foundation of fiction, that the heroes of the “Space Trilogy” talk about.
C. S. Lewis. A resident of Venus asks a guest from Earth: “Why think about what is not and will not be? “We are always busy with this,” he explains. “We put words together to write down what is not there—beautiful words, and we put them together well, and then we tell each other. Is it called poetry or literature... It’s entertaining, pleasant, and wise...”24.
A similar example is from D. Fowles’ novel “The Magus”: “I’m speaking seriously. Roman died. He died like alchemy... I understood this even before the war. And do you know what I did then? I burned all the novels I found in my library. Dickens. Cervantes. Dostoevsky. Flaubert. Great and small... Since then I have been healthy and happy. Why wade through hundreds of pages of fiction in search of small homegrown truths? - For pleasure? - Pleasure! – he mimicked. – Words are needed to tell the truth.
Reflect facts, not fantasies."25.
The following (second level) meaning of the term “convention”
reflects a specific system of means of expression inherent in a particular type of art. There is no need to explain that, say, for music it is sound, for painting it is image, and for ballet it is dance. Limited opportunities means of expressiveness significantly constrain the artist’s freedom: not everything can be depicted on stage, drawn, or expressed in wood or stone. When writing a theatrical play or libretto, the author’s imagination is already introduced in advance into the strict framework of artistic guidelines and standards accepted for this type of art.
From this point of view, verbal art has a number of advantages, since with the help of words it is easier to convey impressions of events and shades of experiences. And one more significant point: the reader himself comes to the author’s aid. A.P. Chekhov admitted: “When I write, I fully count on the reader, believing that he himself will add the missing elements in the story” 26.
The famous film director M. Forman agrees with the Russian classic: “Literature deals with the kingdom of words, where every phrase can conjure up a new world. The flow of words perfectly reflects the movement of thought and serves as an ideal means for conveying the stream of consciousness. The film usually shows the world from the outside, from a more objective vantage point.
Pictures are concrete, they have more impact, they are universal and convincing, but they are much more difficult to show the inner life.”27
That is why, of all the arts, it is literature that has the best opportunities for embodying “overt” fiction. A literary work contains a more or less detailed description of the extraordinary, giving the reader the opportunity to independently give what is described one or another final, convincing form for him (the reader). It is curious that J. R. R. Tolkien, the creator of one of the most striking fantasy worlds in European literature of the twentieth century, objected not only to the production on stage of “magical stories” like his “Silmarillion”, “The Hobbit”, “The Lord of the Rings”, but even to illustrations for them, pointing out that, acquiring clarity, his “wonderful” characters lose their polysemy, deprived of shades of individual perception “The fundamental difference between any types of art,” explains Tolkien, “that offer a visible representation of Fantasy, from literature, is that they impose on the viewer only one single visible image. And literature creates images that are much more universal and exciting... Drama, by its nature, is hostile to Fantasy. Even the simplest of Fantasies can hardly be successfully embodied in Drama, if the latter appears before the spectator in flesh, in sound and in color, as it should be. Fantastic realities cannot be faked. People dressed as talking animals will produce buffo nada or parody, but not Fantasia.”28 Let us note, by the way, that the writer captures an important feature of artistic models of reality created with the help of fiction - their polyvariance, which significantly activates the reader’s perception.
At the next level (numbered three in the table), the concept of “convention” is synonymous with the concepts of “literary tradition” and “norm”. This is noticeable, for example, when it comes to the totality of aesthetic attitudes of individual literary movements and styles. The world seen through the eyes of a classicist will seem conventional to a romantic, that is, distorted in the spirit of certain philosophical concepts, and vice versa. When eras change, belonging to the norms of the passing time is recognized as a cliche and an anachronism. Hence the frequent calls for “renewal of art”, “liberation of it from conventions”, etc.
This level should also include convention as a specific feature of the reflection of reality in various literary genres and genres, each of which (for example, melodrama, adventure story, detective story) has its own expressive capabilities and limitations, as well as the conventional nature of various artistic techniques (retrospection, inversion, montage, internal monologue, etc.).
Secondary convention and the element of the extraordinary. All the above shades of meaning of the concept of “convention” do not give rise to literary disputes. But moving to the next row of the table, we enter into a controversial area. In fact, where exactly is the boundary between “primary” and “secondary” convention? If the secondary convention is “a deliberate deviation from plausibility,” then the deviation to what extent and in what form? Is the difference between the “formal” (hyperbole, metaphor, symbol) taken into account?
spatio-temporal uncertainty and “givenness” of the situation in the parable) and “actual” (fantastic imagery, depiction of the extraordinary, supernatural, etc.) violation of the boundaries of the possible? In other words, does the distortion of the usual appearance of reality in a work of art always lead to the appearance of an element of the extraordinary in it?
Where is the line beyond which the selection, rethinking and sharpening of the depicted phenomena, immanently inherent in artistic creativity, turn into “explicit” fiction, into a narration of the extraordinary?
There is no unity in the opinions of researchers here. A number of scientists, like A. Mikhailova or N. Elansky, classify hyperbole, sharpening and symbol as secondary conventions, putting them on a par with experiments in the field artistic form, characteristic, for example, of surrealism or the theater of the absurd. Thus, as examples of secondary conventions, A. Mikhailova’s book includes: V. Mukhina’s sculpture “Worker and Collective Farm Woman”, a rocket in front of the Space Pavilion at VDNKh (now the All-Russian Exhibition Center) and the poems of E. Mezhelaitis - “the poetry of bold generalizations”29. N. Elansky equally classifies as secondary convention “internal monologue and improperly direct speech in the form of a stream of consciousness, the principle of montage and retrospection, spatial and temporal displacements, fantastic and grotesque images...”30. As we see, in in this case An unjustified confusion of clearly different-level concepts prevails.
Other researchers, in particular V. Dmitriev, realizing the insufficiency of the criteria, state the impossibility of an unambiguous and final distinction between “conventional” and “life-unlike” forms in art31. N. Vladimirova speaks about the peculiar “fluidity” of this kind of boundaries: “Myth and mythological, more broadly, literary allusions, play and the beginning of the game, mask and mask imagery, having gone through a significant historical and literary path by the twentieth century and having modified their nature, create a wide variety of style models within the framework of a conventional type of artistic generalization. Acting in the past as forms of primary artistic convention, correlated with the means genetically inherent in art, they can acquire signs of secondary character in modern literature”32.
All this is undoubtedly true. However, for our, and any other study of a specific set of literary texts, in this issue at least “working” clarity is needed.
Which artistic phenomena should be classified as primary convention, and which as secondary?
In our book, we adhere to the thesis that the aesthetic norms and artistic techniques discussed above (retrospection and montage, alogism, metaphor and symbol, non-fantastic grotesque, etc.) should still be “listed by department” primary convention. For this purpose, we introduced the third semantic level of the concept “artistic convention”. At the third level, there is still no fiction as an unusual element - such as in fantasy or a fairy tale.
After all, the technique of retrospection, say, in M. Proust or chronological inversion in “A Hero of Our Time” by M. Lermontov cannot be confused with the fantastic hypothesis of time travel from the novel by H. Wells. Similarly, for all the hyperbolicity and caricature of the images of landowners in “ Dead souls"N. Gogol or the officers and officials of the Austrian army in the novel “The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik” by J. Hasek, we still will not call these images “fantastic” - as opposed to no less hyperbolic and caricatured, ironically-otherwise fabulous, but precisely extraordinary images of the devil from “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka” or the salamanders of K. Capek.
Of course, satirical sharpening and fantastic grotesque, the symbolism of the monument “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” and the symbolism of I. Bosch’s paintings are ultimately related to each other.
But they are related only insofar as all these concepts are associated with artistic images, which by their nature are polysemantic and metaphorical, that is, open to various interpretations, “speculation” and rethinking when they are perceived by the reader or viewer.
The same, apparently, is the case with the methods of depicting reality in works that, generally speaking, are classified as non-realistic artistic movements in literature. In principle, being a poetic device, i.e.
category of form, fiction as an element of the extraordinary is equally accessible to all literary movements and artistic systems. Another thing is to what extent it is acceptable for each of these systems. Nevertheless, fantastic and non-fantastic works can be found among the Symbolists, the Expressionists, and other artistic movements.
Based on the study of many literary texts containing fiction, we have formed, perhaps, a subjective opinion that the element of the extraordinary is less characteristic of works with the original author’s focus on stylistic convention, a kind of “normative deformation” of reality in the spirit of certain philosophical and aesthetic principles .
It's clear. The attributes of such artistic systems obscure the fiction and make it difficult for the reader to perceive it. In the initially bizarrely fractured world of such works, science fiction looks like a tautology, an unjustified complication of the form. Moreover, the functionality of fiction is destroyed, its inherent task of activating the cognitive abilities of the perceiver and distracting the reader from everyday routine is not fulfilled. Finally, the illusion of the authenticity of what is happening, so necessary for the adequate perception of almost all types of fiction, is destroyed. But, according to the second, this is only an assumption and requires additional study.
Of course, another approach to defining the boundaries of the concept of “secondary artistic convention” is possible (and still dominates). It can also be understood as any violation by the author of the logic of reality, as any deformation of its objects.
For example, we can refer to the above-cited monograph by V. Dmitriev “Realism and artistic convention” or to the work of A. Volkov “Karel Capek and the problem of realistic convention in the drama of the twentieth century.” V. Dmitriev, among the conventional forms, considers, without additional reservations, “the conventionality of the grotesque, caricature, satire, fantasy and other methods of image creation”33;
A. Volkov, within the framework of the stated topic, turns, among other things, to the analysis of color and sound effects when staging Chapek’s plays34.
“Fiction in the literature of the twentieth century. Study guide. The study guide examines the fantastic literature of the twentieth century. in the context of the development of other types of artistic invention, in...”
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E. N. KOVTUN
Art
in literature
Tutorial
The textbook examines fantastic literature
XX century in the context of the development of other types of artistic fiction, which together constitute a single system of interconnected varieties of narration about the extraordinary. Using the example of prose and dramaturgy of Russian, European and American authors, the book reconstructs original artistic structures - models of reality, characteristic of
fantasy, utopia, parable, literary fairy tale and myth; The features of fiction in satire are explored.
The manual is intended for undergraduate and graduate students studying in the direction and specialty of “Philology” - but it can be useful to anyone who is interested in the general patterns of development of literature or simply reads and loves science fiction.
Preface........................................................Chapter first
THE NATURE OF FICTION AND ITS ARTISTIC TASKS...
The benefits of an integrated study of fiction. – Semantic levels of the concept “convention”. – Secondary convention and element of the extraordinary. – Origin and historical variability of fiction. – Difficulty in perceiving the extraordinary. – Principles of creating fictional worlds. – Types of narration about the extraordinary. – Preliminary remarks on the functions of fiction.Chapter two
FICTION: “POTENTIALLY POSSIBLE” IN SF AND
“TRUE REALITY” FANTASY...................Science fiction as a basic type of fiction. – Classifications of fiction. – Imperfect terminology. – Prehistory of modern science fiction. – Utopia and social fiction. – Rational fantasy model of reality in the novels “Ralph 124С41+”
H. Gernsbeck, “Plutonia” by V. Obruchev, “Aelita” by A. Tolstoy, “Star Maker” by O. Stapledon. – Specifics of the parcel. – The illusion of authenticity. - The hero of a rational fiction work. – Artistic detail in rational fiction. – Tasks and functions of science fiction. – The difference between premises in rational fiction and fantasy. – Varieties of fantasy. – The artistic world of the novels “Angel of the Western Window” by G. Meyrink, “Maiden Christina”
M. Eliade, “Running on the Waves” by A. Green. – Principles of narrative organization. – Criteria for evaluating a hero. – The meaning of “true reality.” – The functionality of the synthesis of two types of fiction in the “Space Trilogy” by C. S. Lewis.
Chapter Three LITERARY MAGIC TALE AND MYTH: COSMOLOGICAL MODEL OF EXISTENCE........................
Modern approaches to the study of myth and fairy tales. – Formation of the fairy tale genre in European literature of the 19th–20th centuries. - The mystery of the attractiveness of fairy tales. – Semantic core of the concepts “fairy tale” and “myth”. – Forms of manifestation of mythological and fairy-tale conventions. – The fairy-tale-mythological model of the world in the epics of T. Mann “Joseph and His Brothers”, J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”, in the stories of P. Travers, in the plays of E. Schwartz and M. Maeterlinck. – Space-time continuum: the relationship between the “historical” and the “eternal.” – Four aspects of the hero’s interpretation. – Archetypal. – “Magical” and “wonderful”
as forms of fiction in fairy tales and myths. - A special way of storytelling.
Chapter Four FICTION AS A MEANS OF SATIRICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ALLEGORY...................................................
Fiction as a form of philosophical allegory. – Degree of extraordinaryness. – A satirical rethinking of the canons of rational fiction in V. Mayakovsky’s plays “The Bedbug” and “Bathhouse”. – Comic mythology of A. France (“Penguin Island”). – “Invisible fiction” of the parable (“The Castle” by F. Kafka). – Formalization of the premise in G. Hesse’s novel “The Glass Bead Game.” – Functions of metaphorical imagery in J. P. Sartre’s drama “The Flies.” – Satirical and philosophical-metaphorical models of the world.
Chapter Five SYNTHESIS OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF FICTION IN A WORK OF ART...................................................
Unified semantic field of fiction. – Artistic possibilities for synthesizing various types of conventions. – Types of fiction and related layers of content in the novels “The War with the Newts” by K. Capek, “The Master and Margarita” by M. Bulgakov, the short story “The Metamorphosis” by F. Kafka. – The mechanism of interaction between different types of narration about the extraordinary. – Multidimensionality of the image. – Overcoming schematism. – Increasing the associative potential of the text.
Chapter Six
EVOLUTION OF EASTERN EUROPEAN FICTION IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE XX CENTURY AND AT THE TURN OF THE XX-XXI CENTURIES.
Narration of the extraordinary in the second half of the twentieth century: evolution and problems of study. – Periodization of post-war Russian and Eastern European fantastic prose. Reasons for the dominance of the NF in the socialist era. – The fate of fantasy and the change in the ratio of different types of science fiction in the 1970s–1980s. – The role and tasks of fantastic literature under socialism. – Changes in the literary situation in Russia and Eastern European countries in the first half of the 1990s. – The place of fantastic prose in new cultural paradigms. – Adventure schemes in fiction of rational premise. – Social and philosophical tradition in market conditions. – The rise of fantasy and attempts to create its national variants. – Ironic fantasy. – A fantastic element in “elite” literature. Science fiction and postmodernism. – Social functions and expressive possibilities of fiction of the second half of the 20th – early 21st centuries.Conclusion................................................... 449 Notes ............................................... 461 Recommended reading ................................... 483
Preface
This book is a textbook that partially reproduces the material from the monograph by the same author, “The Poetics of the Extraordinary: The Artistic Worlds of Fantasy, Fairy Tale, Utopia, Parable and Myth,” which was published in a small edition in 1999. Compared to the previous text, the current one has added a large section on science fiction of the second half of the last century and the turn of the 20th–21st centuries. Changes and additions were also made to other sections, a list of recommended literature was compiled, and other amendments were made that correspond to the genre of the educational publication.
However, the revision of the text, albeit quite serious, did not violate the original intention: to summarize the results of scientific research, covering all the options presented in the fiction of the twentieth century. a special type of work, which in this book we will call a narrative about the extraordinary. What are we talking about and what are the objectives of the manual?
The simplest definition of the object of study sounds like this: we are interested in works that contain an element of the extraordinary, that is, telling about something that “does not happen” in modern objective reality or “cannot exist at all.” We are not talking about the unusual as unique, that is, possible under a rare combination of circumstances, but rather about the extraordinary, the non-existent, although, of course, it is sometimes not at all easy to draw the line between the concepts of “impossible” and “incredible”1.
“The unprecedented” and “impossible” interest us regardless of the way it is manifested in the text. It can look like science fiction with its inherent attributes (aliens, robots, time travel), look like a fairy tale (magicians, transformations, talking animals), a mythological drama or novel (the author’s cosmogony disguised as “antiquity”), utopia ( an ideal or terrible world of the future), etc. The extraordinary can be presented at any level of the artistic structure of a work - in the plot, in the system of characters, in the form of individual fantastic images and details.
Since the time of A.S. Pushkin, literature has often been likened to a “magic crystal” that transforms reality in accordance with the will of the author. But at the same time, they do not always remember that such a transformation can be carried out equally convincingly and vividly both with the help of artistic images, more or less habitually recreating the appearance of the world, and in forms that change it, giving reality an unrecognizable appearance. In the latter case, various options for narrating the extraordinary arise. We can say that this type of work represents the pinnacle of verbal creativity: after all, under the artist’s pen, something appears that has not previously existed in the world.
Of course, extraordinary phenomena and images found in fiction cannot be considered something fundamentally new, unprecedented and unknown before the book was written.
The human brain is not able to create anything that does not have, albeit indirectly, a connection with reality. “There is no such fiction that would be an absolute product of “creative imagination” and cannot exist. The most desperate science fiction writer and visionary does not “create” his images, but composes them, combines them, synthesizes them from real data”2.
So, the creator of the narrative of the extraordinary creates only unusual combinations of familiar realities (we will talk about this in detail in Chapter 1). In addition, he always has the opportunity to rely on inaccurate information, superstitions and prejudices that live in the minds of even the most rationally thinking readers, on the most ancient (even archaic myth) ideas, traditions and legends, as well as on the centuries-old tradition of narrating about the extraordinary - that is worlds and stories created by his predecessors. This is why most fantastic, fairy-tale, mythological, etc. images are so “recognizable”, and many of them turn into cliches over time.
Stories about the extraordinary and supernatural, impossible in principle or still inaccessible to human knowledge have always constituted an important part of fine literature, not to mention folklore genres. If you try to trace the history of a narrative of this type, then the list of works will have to start with Homer and Apuleius. A tradition stretching through centuries will cover the works of Ariosto and Dante, T. More and T. Campanella, D. Swift and F. Rabelais, F. Bacon and S. Cyrano de Bergerac, C. Maturin and H. Walpole, O. Balzac and E. Poe, as well as many other famous writers.
Despite the dominance of pragmatism and rationalism, the narrative of the extraordinary is clearly represented in the literature of the recently ended century. At the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. created epics by T. Mann and J. R. R. Tolkien, novels by A. France, G. Wells, O. Stapledon, K. Capek, A. Tolstoy, A. Conan Doyle, D. London, R. L. Stevenson, B. Stoker, G. Meyrink, M. Eliade, A. Green, V. Bryusov, M. Bulgakov, utopias by O. Huxley, E. Zamyatin, D. Orwell, parables by G. Hesse, F. Kafka, K.S. Lewis, plays by G. Ibsen, B. Shaw, M. Maeterlinck, L. Andreev, fairy tales by O. Wilde, A. de Saint-Exupéry, Y. Olesha, E. Schwartz, P. Bazhov and many other works containing an element of the extraordinary .
In the second half of the last century, the traditions of narrating the extraordinary were adopted and developed in the works of many writers belonging to the “elites” of national literatures (Ch. Aitmatov, A. Kim, R. Bach, H. L. Borges, P. Ackroyd, S. Game). But no less significant is the merit of authors working in certain areas of popular literature, primarily in science fiction (A. Azimov, A. Clark, R. Bradbury, P. Boole, S. King, M. Moorcock, W. Le Guin, I Efremov, A. and B. Strugatsky, L. Soucek, P. Vezhinov, K. Borun, S. Lem). A surge of interest in the extraordinary occurred at the end of the twentieth century. and was associated both with the spread of the philosophy and aesthetics of postmodernism in fiction (D. Fowles, M. Pavich, G. Petrovich, V. Pelevin, M. Weller, V. Sorokin, D. Lipskerov, M. Urban, O. Tokarczuk) , and with a change in the structure of the narrative and the relationship between various types of fiction in the former socialist countries, with the arrival of a new generation of talents (A. Sapkovsky, G. L. Oldi, S. Loginov, E. Lukin, M. Uspensky, etc.) .
However, despite the vividness of the examples taken from the works of the classics, it is not always easy to isolate and adequately interpret the element of the extraordinary in a work of art. The fact is that it can be presented both visually, embodied in extraordinary, magical, supernatural and similar images, and in a hidden form, turning into a kind of “fantastic beginning”, including a special plot premise, specific action parameters, and sometimes everything only the author’s general intention to create a situation that is obviously impossible in reality. The role of the extraordinary element in revealing the author's intention can also be different - from decisive to secondary.
In addition, the type of narrative under study has its own specifics in each of the literary genres and artistic movements. In the most general terms, turning to the extraordinary is a universal way of depicting the world in literature (and in other forms of art and spheres of culture), equally accessible to artists of all eras and adherents of different aesthetic concepts. But the “extraordinary” in the interpretation of the romantics is not in all respects similar to the “magical” in a folk tale and bears little resemblance to the “potentially possible” in the science fiction of realist writers. We can only say with some degree of certainty that there are literary movements that are more sensitive to the extraordinary than others - such as, for example, the romanticism and postmodernism mentioned above.
In the aesthetics of many philosophical systems and artistic platforms of the twentieth century. (surrealism, absurdity, deconstructivism, etc.) the element of the extraordinary is subordinated to the logic of the basic principles of interpretation of existence, distorting reality and destroying the traditional structure of the narrative so much that it ceases to be perceived as incredible and impossible. This is a separate interesting area of research, which, due to its specificity, we are forced to leave aside. Our book will examine literary works that contain a fairly pronounced plot and system of images that reproduce reality at least in relative harmony and completeness. For the same reasons, we will limit ourselves to talking about prose and drama, because the extraordinary in poetry (especially lyrical) has a different - however, still practically unexplored - appearance.
The variety of forms and a special kind of “elusiveness”, the organic entry into the poetics of a variety of literary movements, as well as the historical and national variability of fiction lead to the fact that the narrative of the extraordinary in the unity of all its variants is studied relatively little, because commonality is obscured in the eyes of researchers by diversity.
That's why we see our main task as showing:
the most important laws for the creation of fictional worlds are the same, if not for verbal creativity in general, then at least for the artistic thinking of a certain historical era.
The first difficulty on the chosen path is the choice of basic terms with which to analyze various types of narration about the extraordinary. In Russian literary criticism (namely, in its semantic field the present study was conducted) there seems to be no shortage of definitions related to the sphere of the extraordinary.
However, we have to note with regret the absence of a unified conceptual system that allows us to mutually correlate the terms “fiction”, “conjecture”, “convention”, “fantasy”, “fantastic grotesque” (as well as metaphor, hyperbole, symbol, etc.) and their internal gradations. Moreover, there is no strict definition of the concepts “supernatural”, “wonderful”, “magical”, “magical”, “mystical” in relation to the poetics of a work of art. But there is also, say, “horror” or “alternative history” as a designation for the semantic core of some genre varieties of the modern science fiction novel. And it is clear that the terms and definitions “myth” and “mythological prose”, “fairy tale” and “fairy tale”, “science fiction” and “fantasy”, “utopia” and “dystopia”, “allegory” are directly related to the subject being studied. ", "parable", "novel of disasters", "novel-warning", "phantasmagoria" - and many others. Each of them has unique shades of meaning, but in some area of meaning contains a reference to the element of the extraordinary.
In other words, interpreting “extraordinary” in the system of traditional scientific categories is quite difficult. We believe that this can be most adequately done using three concepts: fantasy, fiction, artistic convention. Unfortunately, none of these terms fully covers the phenomenon of interest to us.
The familiar and seemingly most expressive term “fantasy” is, paradoxically, now the most limited in meaning. In the 20th century it turned out to be assigned primarily to a special area of popular literature (and to an independent subculture that goes beyond literary boundaries), combining two types of fantastic storytelling: science fiction and fantasy. Multimillion-dollar blockbusters in cinema, virtual worlds of computer games and familiar colorful books telling about galactic empires or battles between werewolves and vampires have made us almost forget the broad literary interpretation of the terms “fantasy” and “fantasy”. It has been preserved only in special publications like the “Concise Literary Encyclopedia”: “Fiction is a specific method of depicting life, using an artistic form-image (object, situation, world), in which elements of reality are combined in a way that is not inherent in it in principle - incredibly, “wonderfully” ", supernatural"3. So today it is possible to talk about “fantastic” as extraordinary in a utopia, parable or literary fairy tale only with some stretch.
The concept of “fiction” also seems successful only at first glance, since it is devoid of unambiguity. Usually, when talking about fiction, they mean one of two or even three meanings of the term. In the first, most common case, fiction is interpreted very broadly: as the most essential, institutional feature of fiction - the writer’s subjective recreation of reality and a figurative form of knowledge of the world. In the "Concise Literary Encyclopedia"
we read: “Fiction is one of the main aspects of literary and artistic creativity, which consists in the fact that a writer, based on real reality, creates new, artistic facts... A writer, using real private facts, usually combines them into a new “fictional” whole”4 .
In this meaning, the term “fiction” characterizes the content of any work of art as a product of the author’s imagination. After all, in the end, even a realistic novel or essay contains a fair amount of fiction. All types of art rely on conscious invention, and this distinguishes them, on the one hand, from science, and on the other, from religious teachings. The famous Pushkin phrase: “I will shed tears over fiction” refers us precisely to this meaning of the term.
A variant of the first meaning or the second independent meaning of the concept of “fiction” can be considered the principle of constructing works traditionally classified as “mass” literature, deliberately condensing and sharpening the course of events characteristic of everyday reality - adventure-adventure, love-melodramatic, detective novels, etc.5 They do not contain the impossible as such, but the incredible is present - at least in the form of coincidences, coincidences, and the concentration of vicissitudes of fate that befall the hero. In relation to such texts, the term “fiction”
means “fiction”, “fable”, “fantasy” (as opposed to fantasy as the basis of art).
As a synonym for the concepts “fantastic”, “extraordinary” and “wonderful”, the word “fiction” is used much less frequently. Although the same “Concise Literary Encyclopedia” admits:
“By creating a fact that could naturally happen, the writer is able to reveal to us the “possibilities” inherent in life, the hidden tendencies of its development. Sometimes this requires such fiction... which goes beyond the boundaries of “plausibility” and gives rise to fantastic artistic facts...”6.
The term “artistic convention” should apparently be recognized as the most “strict” of those discussed. The domestic science of literature devoted several decades to its codification. In the 1960s–1970s. a distinction was made between the primary convention, which characterizes the figurative nature of art (similar to the broad meaning of the term “fiction”), as well as the set of expressive means inherent in different types of art, and the secondary convention, denoting the writer’s deliberate departure from literal verisimilitude.
True, the boundaries of such a retreat were not established. As a result, within the framework of the concept of “secondary convention,” allegory and fairy tale, metaphor and grotesque, satirical point and fantastic premise, so different in “degree of improbability,” turned out to be. There was no more or less clear distinction between “any violation of the logic of reality” and “an element of extraordinary, obvious fiction, fantasy.” Thus, our understanding of secondary convention as an element of the extraordinary is somewhat more local than the generally accepted meaning of the term.
The concepts of “convention” and “secondary convention,” which, unfortunately, are not free from the ideological dogmas of the era that gave birth to them, have at least one undoubted advantage: they allow us to include in the scope of research the entire set of options for narrating the extraordinary. This is why the term “convention” becomes basic for us. But, of course, we do not abandon the concepts of “fiction” and “fantasy”, using them in a narrow sense - as synonyms for the element of the extraordinary. We will explain all this in more detail in Chapter 1.
In domestic (and foreign, as far as we can judge) literary criticism of the twentieth century. Two virtually independent traditions of studying the narrative of the extraordinary have formed. The first is characterized by an interest in convention (its incomplete Western analogue can be considered the concept of fiction7) as a philosophical and aesthetic category, considered among the most general theoretical concepts (artistic image, reflection and re-creation of reality in a literary work, etc.). The second tradition is represented by a set of works that explore the artistic specificity of the extraordinary as an integral part of the poetics of various genres and areas of literature: science fiction and fantasy, literary fairy tales and myths, as well as parables, utopias, satires.
We will provide a review of critical literature of both the first and second types in the corresponding chapters of this book.
Our work attempts to combine these traditions and analyze the narrative of the extraordinary in the unity of its various manifestations in a literary text.
The second difficulty of the ongoing research is related to the need to resolve the issue of classifying the types of narration about the extraordinary. We consider it possible to distinguish six independent types of artistic conventions: rational (science) fiction and fantasy (fantasy), fairy tale, mythological, satirical and philosophical conventions, more or less associated with the genre structures of literary fairy tales, utopia, parables, mythological, fantastic, satirical novel, etc.8 The criteria for identifying and the specifics of each type will be substantiated in detail in Chapters 2, 3 and 4.
However, our task is not only to identify the substantive and artistic differences between different versions of the narration of the extraordinary. We intend to show that, along with quite numerous examples of relatively “pure” use by writers of one or another type of secondary convention, no less often one can find cases of combination and reinterpretation in a work of artistic principles and semantic associations characteristic of different types of fiction. Based on this, we consider it possible to talk about a unified system of interrelated types and forms of artistic convention in relation to the literature of the twentieth century, which confirms the relationship of all types with each other.
The third difficulty lies in developing principles for analyzing various versions of the narration of the extraordinary.
It is easy to understand that it is impossible to finally and irrevocably separate, say, dystopia from science fiction or fantasy from a literary fairy tale. In some cases, one can interpret fiction in different ways and even argue about whether it is present at all (“The Castle” by F. Kafka, “The City of Great Fear” by J. Ray, “Lame Fate” by A. and B. Strugatsky). However, each type of convention that determines the appearance of the extraordinary for a particular group of works is easily recognized by both readers and critics.
Any person who is not versed in the science of literature, even if he is indifferent or unfriendly towards the story of the extraordinary, as a rule, is able to determine from the very first pages of an unfamiliar book what exactly is in front of him: fantasy, utopia, parable, fairy tale or myth.
How does this distinction occur? It would be logical to assume that it is based on a unique set of artistic means that each type of fiction has at its disposal. However, this hypothesis is hardly true. After all, the same principles for re-creating reality, not to mention specific techniques, images and details, can be used with equal success by different types of narration about the extraordinary. For example, “wonderful” heroes can be found in fantasy, fairy tales, myth, satire, and even science fiction. However, in each of these genres and areas of literature they will acquire their own motivation and functions.
For example, a person with unusual abilities in science fiction will take the form of a scientist who discovered the effect of invisibility (“The Invisible Man” by H. Wells), the creator of a new weapon (“Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” by A. Tolstoy) or the victim of a scientific experiment (“Amphibian Man” A. Belyaev), and in fantasy he will become a sorcerer possessing secret knowledge (“A Wizard of Earthsea” by W. Le Guin), or a romantic soaring on the wings of a dream (“The Shining World” by A. Green). An unusual enemy or assistant, depending on the type of fiction, will turn out to be a robot (“Frankenstein” by M. Shelley), an alien (“Who are you?” by D. Campbell), a vampire (“Count Dracula”
B. Stoker), talking animals (The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis), an animate object (The Blue Bird by M. Maeterlinck). The formula for controlling the elements will be embodied in the form of a mathematical equation, a magic spell, a children's rhyme... Various types of narration about the extraordinary can freely exchange images and characters, rethinking the “supernatural” in the spirit of a rational-fantastic hypothesis, philosophical allegory, etc.
Consequently, the specificity of individual types of narration about the extraordinary can be identified not at the level of individual techniques or even a set of visual means, but only by taking into account the unity of the substantive and formal aspects of the work. A conclusion about whether a text belongs to a certain type of narrative about the extraordinary can be made only on the basis of an analysis that reveals the purpose and method of using fiction and the features of the picture of the world created by the writer. In other words, it is necessary to consider holistic models of reality generated by various types of convention. Only such an analysis can show what facts and signs of real life the author uses to depict the fictional world, how he reinterprets these facts, giving them an extraordinary appearance; and most importantly - why this rethinking is happening, what topics it allows to touch upon, what questions to pose.
We will study the content and artistic specifics of each type of narration about the extraordinary in a certain sequence of aspects. First of all, we will pay attention to the features of the premise (the assumption that forms the plot that extraordinary events happened or could happen “in reality”), its motivation (how the author justifies the appearance of the extraordinary and whether it is justified at all), the forms of expression of the extraordinary (“miraculous” in fantasy, “magical” in a fairy tale, “magical” in myth, “potentially possible” in rational fiction, etc.), features of the figurative system; space-time continuum in which the action takes place (and its “material”
design with the help of extraordinary objects and details), and, finally, the tasks and functions of a specific type of fiction. We strive to ensure that our research leads to the creation of “collective images”, a kind of “verbal portraits” of fiction in various genres and areas of fiction.
The chosen principle—the analysis of models of reality created by various types of convention—determines the structure of the book. It consists of six chapters. In the first, we summarize the study of the problem of artistic convention in Russian literary criticism over the past half century and present the gradation of meanings of the term “convention” that we have developed. Here, issues related to the origin and historical variability of literary fiction are discussed, principles for creating extraordinary images and worlds are formulated, and there is a conversation about the differences between authors who actively use fiction and those who do not.
The second, third and fourth chapters are devoted to the consideration of individual types of convention, and the closest types, for which, in our opinion, similarities are more important than differences (rational fiction and fantasy, fairy tale and myth, satirical and philosophical convention), are combined within one chapter.
Our analysis is carried out mainly on the material of European literature of the first half of the twentieth century. We consider European literature as a single space in which, despite the undeniable national specificity, general trends in the development of narration about the extraordinary operate. We consider it possible to include the literature of the USA and Russia in the last century to this same space.
First half of the twentieth century. was chosen because it represents the era of the most vivid functioning of the system of interrelated types of convention that interests us. First of all, these years are the “golden age” of scientific (especially socio-philosophical) fiction. K. Chapek, O. Stapledon, A. Tolstoy turn to it, and a generation of “classics of the genre” comes to American science fiction - A. Azimov, G. Kuttner, K. Simak, R. Heinlein, T. Sturgeon. At the same time, fantasy is experiencing a new flourishing (H. Meyrink, H. Lovecraft, H. H. Evers, M. Eliade).
During this period, interest in fairy tales was also revived. Its artistic principles are used by representatives of a variety of movements - from O. Wilde, M. Maeterlinck and Russian symbolists to S. Lagerlöf, E. Schwartz, P. Travers.
The mythological novel is formed as an independent genre variety, connecting, on the one hand, with the tradition of “heroic” fantasy (J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis), and on the other, with philosophical prose and parables (T. Mann) .
Philosophical convention clearly manifests itself in drama (B. Shaw, B. Brecht, K. Chapek). A new type of utopia is emerging (E. Zamyatin, O. Huxley), in which the previous principle of a consistent author's story about an ideal world is replaced by a dynamic narrative determined by a rational-fantastic premise. Thus, it was the first half of the twentieth century. becomes the era of the formation of artistic “canons” for many areas of modern literature related to fiction.
In principle, the proposed classification is correct for the literature of the 19th–20th centuries (and most fully for the 1890–1950s). But in the nineteenth century. The system we postulated was still in its infancy. In turn, the completion of its formation in the middle of our century in no way ensured its stability, and already the second half of the century made significant adjustments to our classification.
The most striking and memorable type of “explicit” fiction in literature of at least the last three centuries remains, undoubtedly, fantasy. That is why our book pays special attention to it. Chapter 2 describes the two main types of fantastic prose and drama of the twentieth century: science fiction and fantasy. Using these familiar definitions, we subject them to certain adjustments.
Firstly, we prefer the less common concept of “rational fiction” (RF) to the term “science fiction” (SF), which emphasizes the specificity of the premise and the special worldview inherent in this group of works (the logical motivation for the fantastic assumption in the text). About the history of origin, codification and semantic contradictions that arise when using the term “science fiction”
in relation to modern literature, we will discuss this in detail in Chapters 2 and 6.
Secondly, our understanding of fantasy is also somewhat different from the generally accepted one. In the second chapter we will explain that this term in our work describes works in which the motivation of the premise, as a rule, is removed outside the text and, based on the principles of mythological thinking, constructs a special model of the world, which we designate as “true reality.” In Russian literary criticism, due to the historical characteristics of its development, a special term denoting this type of fiction has never appeared. That is why, when in the last decades of the past century a steady interest in this type of narration about the extraordinary arose in the Russian and Eastern European literary space, the corresponding definition (fantasy, fantasy) was borrowed from the Anglo-American scientific tradition.
Over time, however, in both the West and the East, the initial broad understanding of fantasy as "the literature of the magical, the supernatural, the magical and the inexplicable"
narrowed in the mass consciousness to the designation of the genre of “commercial” stories and novels telling about local fictional worlds with a conditionally medieval magical “decor”. A huge number of the same type of works about modest but courageous heroes overcoming the obstacles of an imaginary universe in search of a magical artifact or the source of absolute Evil, has crowded out the once equally numerous science fiction texts from the readers’ memory and for a new generation of science fiction lovers has become almost the only option for the story of extraordinary.
Such literature is now so widespread that the delimitation of the sphere of the fantastic on the Russian (and Czech, Polish, etc.) book market in recent years looks not like “science fiction” and “fantasy”, but like “fantasy” and “science fiction” (we will discuss the reasons in Chapter 6). However, the paradox is that “fantasy” today actually means only one of the variants of the original meaning of the term
- the so-called “heroic fantasy”, or “fantasy of sword and sorcery” (we will talk more about this in Chapter 2).
Russification of the English-language term has not yet been completed.
In different sources, the concept of “fantasy” is used both in the feminine and neuter gender, and even in different graphic versions (fantasy, fantasy, etc.). That's why we prefer to do without transliteration. Graphics have a terminological meaning for us. Where the spelling “fantasy” appears in this book, we are talking, in accordance with our concept, about a special type of convention that uses a fantastic (but not fairy-tale or mythological!) premise without logical motivation in the text. The spelling “fantasy” is retained in quotes or when denoting current publishing realities.
The fifth chapter of the manual deals with the synthesis of different types of conventions in a literary text. We try to show that this synthesis gives rise to a special content and structural complexity of the works, which is their main advantage. The simultaneous use of the artistic principles of fantasy, fairy tales, parables, etc. leads to the mutual imposition of corresponding models of reality and to the multiplication of associations, which, in turn, gives rise to an endless play of meanings and creates the possibility of ever new interpretations of the author’s concept.
In the final sixth chapter, we return to the conversation about science fiction - but already in the chronological coordinates of the second half of the twentieth century and the turn of the 20th–21st centuries.
Such a return is due to the desire to trace the evolution of the system of interconnected types and forms of secondary convention that we postulate beyond the boundaries of the historical era within which it was formed. It is advisable to start a conversation about evolution with the most obvious changes, and they occurred in the second half of the last century precisely in the sphere of science fiction and the fantastic.In this chapter we will find out under what conditions and under the influence of what ideological concepts the post-war science fiction of the USSR and other socialist countries developed, gaining increasing popularity, but at the same time losing the novelty of the problematic and the diversity of artistic structure. We will try to trace in what directions the most gifted authors sought a way out of the crisis that engulfed narrowly interpreted science fiction literature. Let us explain how the fantasy tradition was latently born in the space described. Finally, we will show how, under the influence of political, economic and cultural changes in the post-socialist literary space of Russia and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. A new reader demand is being formed and the patterns of creation and functioning of literary texts are being built differently. Science fiction becomes a mirror of these processes, accumulating the most striking, and therefore often controversial and dramatic features of the era. We will talk about the commercialization of fantastic prose, the not always favorable influence of Western book products, and the laws of the market, which places strict demands on the content and poetics of fantastic works.
Considerable difficulties in the study of fiction are caused by the selection of texts that demonstrate the characteristics of certain types of narration about the extraordinary. Of course, it is impossible not only to consider, but even to simply mention all the works created in the twentieth century and containing an element of the extraordinary.
That is why we will rely mainly on the best examples of world prose and drama, in which convention becomes the main means of realizing the author's intention. However, in addition to this, the book will also mention works that do not belong to the number of indisputable masterpieces, but clearly characterize one or another type of fiction. At the same time (with the exception of Chapter 6, in which such a conversation becomes inevitable due to the specifics of the modern literary situation), we deliberately avoid dividing the studied corpus of texts into “serious” literature and “mass” genres, leaving aside the problems of fiction being declared by many researchers literary-critical “ghetto”. Our task is to prove: there are no “massive” types of fiction unworthy of the attention of serious researchers. The semantic and aesthetic level of a literary text containing “obvious” fiction, like all others, depends only on the talent and goals of the writer.
This manual is intended for students, undergraduates and graduate students studying in the direction and specialty “Philology”, as well as, given the “interdisciplinary” nature of the sphere of manifestation of the extraordinary in modern culture, and for other specialists in the field of the humanities and non-humanities. The material presented in the manual can be used when teaching courses on the history of domestic and foreign literature, as well as theoretical literary disciplines.
Finally, this book will be of interest to everyone who reads and loves science fiction, maintains, regardless of age and occupation, an interest in fairy-tale and mythological interpretations of existence, has a penchant for thought experiments in the spaces of non-existent worlds and never tires of asking themselves questions about the meaning of humanity existence in an endless and constantly changing world.
We hope that reading this book will help:
– understand the important role that “explicit” fiction (narration of the extraordinary) plays in the literature of the twentieth century, as well as previous eras;
– to understand the terminological disputes that have been going on for many decades by representatives of scientific schools and traditions involved in the study of various types of narration about the extraordinary and related genres;
– to navigate the diverse and colorful world of the fantastic subculture that is so popular and rapidly expanding today;
– take a fresh look at the literary process in Russia, Europe and America from spheres traditionally considered marginal (fiction, fairy-tale prose, etc.), but nevertheless revealing the evolution of artistic structures no less (and sometimes more vividly), rather than leading genres and main trends;
– expand theoretical and literary knowledge and horizons by becoming familiar with fantasy studies as a special branch of the science of literature, as well as with a detailed interpretation of its basic terms “fiction”, “artistic convention”, “artistic image” and the principles of depicting reality in a work of art.
We are fully aware of the difficulty of the tasks we have undertaken, the breadth of the problem, and the substantive and structural heterogeneity of the material chosen for analysis. However, without pretending to provide exhaustive answers, we are still convinced: the proposed concept, and most importantly, the interpretation of the narrative of the extraordinary as a single aesthetic phenomenon, can bring us closer to understanding the nature of artistic fiction - a unique phenomenon that constitutes the essence and main decoration of verbal creativity.
– – –
THE NATURE OF FICTION
AND HIS ARTISTIC
TASKS
The benefits of an integrated study of fiction.Semantic levels of the concept “convention”.
Secondary convention and the element of the extraordinary.
The origin and historical variability of fiction.
Difficulty in perceiving the extraordinary.
Principles for creating fictional worlds.
Types of narration about the extraordinary.
Preliminary remarks on the functions of fiction.
– – –
The benefits of an integrated study of fiction. Interest in problems and discussions related to the concepts of “fiction” and “artistic convention” once began for us with the question: why do many readers not like science fiction? The author of these lines has more than once had to deal with bewilderment, condescending neglect, and, finally, conscious rejection of science fiction works as “boring,” “childish,” “primitive,” and “unartistic.” Let us make a reservation right away: we are far from the idea of defending the aesthetic value of all fantastic texts.
Like any literature, science fiction can be good and bad.
This book will focus mainly on the second.
Studying the reasons for likes and dislikes for science fiction led us to the understanding that the problem is by no means limited to it alone. We are talking about the peculiarities of the perception by different groups of people of any literary texts, the plots and images of which are distinguished by a certain unusualness, or rather, extraordinaryness. What is meant? These images and plots in the minds of readers are correlated not with real or “potentially real”, i.e., in principle, facts that can be discovered and events that can happen, but only with some generalized ideas about the sphere of the possible or impossible - as well as with what has already happened invented and told or described by someone.
Extraordinary characters and plots can have very different appearances. They can rely on the ancient archetypes existing in the human consciousness and trace their origins to archaic myth (doubles, the living dead, nightmarish monsters and personified fears in the short stories of E. Poe, G.
F. Lovecraft, F. Kafka or the novels of S. King), but are also capable of becoming, like the images of science fiction, a product of modernity (travel to the stars in the books of A. Asimov, A. Clark or S. Lem, communist utopia in the novels of I. Efremov, etc.). The “degree of extraordinaryness” may also vary. Fiction and literary fairy tales “know” undoubted miracles. But a parable or a utopia of the classical type is difficult to convict of “obvious extraordinaryness”, however, in the minds of readers they somehow correlate, if not with the concept of “fantasy”, then with the sphere of the “hypothetical”
or “impossible in reality.”
Nevertheless, the patterns of perception of such texts and opinions about them among different people are approximately the same. They were expressed in the clearest form by one of the author’s casual interlocutors, who said with sincere bewilderment: “I don’t understand how you can read about something that doesn’t actually happen?”
The question is clear and logical: why waste time thinking about something that will never, under any circumstances, be encountered in life? The answer is not so simple. It usually takes a lot of effort to explain: works that tell about the extraordinary also introduce the reader to reality, but they do it in a special form. This is how M. Arnaudov reveals this paradox: “We... discover in... a fictional world a psychological realism that can reconcile us with phantasmagoria... If we come to terms with conventions from the very beginning, then we will only have to wonder how in this world of the strange and incredible, the principles of humanity are preserved and how everything happens due to the same basic laws that observation reveals in reality”9.
We will return to explaining the possibilities and advantages of such a narrative about the extraordinary later.
So, the problem lies in the peculiarities of different people’s perception of the “impossible” and “unreal”, i.e. “deliberately invented”, “fantasized”, “obviously fictional” in its most diverse manifestations in a work of art. But what is it? How to define and interpret such phenomena in more or less generally accepted scientific categories?
The concepts of fiction and fantasy are so common and familiar that it would seem that it would not be difficult to explain the processes behind them. However, the explanation is unlikely to be exhaustive and accurate: these words have too many “everyday” shades of meaning. And these shades are not always positive. Almost more often than with the awareness of the power of imagination, which stimulates a person’s creative activity, they turn out to be associated with ideas about aimless pastime, empty and unnecessary dreams, “fantasizing,” deception, etc. Thus, although the concepts of “fiction” and “ “fantasy” can be used in a conversation on a topic that interests us, relying on them without providing clarifications (“obvious” fiction, fantasy as the creation of the extraordinary) and operating only with them is hardly advisable.
That is why, from our point of view, there is an obvious need to choose and justify a special term, free from “ordinary” connotations, to denote the writer’s clear departure in the text of the work beyond the limits of what is possible in reality. The need to pose a general problem of the formation and functioning of fiction as an element of the extraordinary is also obvious.
The latter is necessary first of all and mainly for the study of areas of literature and genre structures related to fiction, such as science fiction (SF and fantasy) and satire (more precisely, that part of it where the grotesque clearly goes beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable in life), utopia, parable, as well as fairy tales and myths in their modern literary forms.
Traditionally, fiction is studied mainly in its particular manifestations in certain areas of literature and genres or in the works of certain writers10. The number of comparative studies devoted to the search for general principles for creating fictional images and plots in various fields of literature is, unfortunately, small11. At the same time, the idea of the structural commonality of all varieties of fiction is latently present even in works devoted to their most decisive demarcation.
Tangible and sometimes insurmountable difficulties arise when trying to distinguish science fiction into a special “type of literature” (we will dwell on this in detail in Chapter 2), when distinguishing between such genre structures as a fantastic (related to fantasy) story and a fairy tale, as well as fairy tale and myth, utopia and dystopia in their modern versions and a science fiction novel. Most often, interesting and significant results of research in the field of individual genre structures associated with fiction serve as an argument in favor of the genetic relatedness and artistic unity of all varieties of literary fiction with an infinite variety of its specific embodiments in works - and, therefore, confirmation of the need for a comprehensive, systematic consideration of it.
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Artistic fiction
Artistic fiction
Events, characters, circumstances depicted in fiction that do not exist in reality. Fiction does not pretend to be true, but it is not a lie either. This is a special kind of artistic convention, both the author of the work and the readers understand that the events and characters described did not actually exist, but at the same time they perceive what is depicted as something that could happen in our everyday earthly life or in some other world.
IN folklore the role and place of fiction were strictly limited: fictional plots and heroes were allowed only in fairy tales. In world literature, fiction gradually took root when works of literature began to be perceived as artistic compositions designed to surprise, delight and entertain. Literatures Dr. The East, ancient Greek and Roman literature in the first centuries of their existence did not know fiction as a conscious technique. They narrated either about gods and mythological heroes and their deeds, or about historical events and their participants. All this was considered true, happening in reality. However, already in the 5th–6th centuries. BC e. Ancient Greek writers ceased to perceive mythological stories as narratives about real events. In the 4th century. philosopher Aristotle in his treatise “Poetics” he argued that the main difference literary works from historical works is that historians write about events that happened in reality, and writers write about those that could have happened.
At the beginning of our era, a genre was formed in ancient Greek and Roman literature novel, in which fiction is the basis of the narrative. The most incredible adventures happen to the heroes of the novels (usually a young man and a girl in love), but in the end the lovers are happily united. In its origin, fiction in the novel is largely related to the plots of fairy tales. Since late antiquity, the novel has become the main literary genre , in which fiction is required. Later, in the Middle Ages and during the era Renaissance , a small one joins them prose genre with an unexpected plot development - short story . In modern times, genres are formed stories And story
, also inextricably linked with artistic fiction. In Western European medieval literature, artistic fiction is characteristic primarily of poetic and prosaic works. chivalric romances . In the 17th–18th centuries. the genre was very popular in European literature. The plots of adventure novels were built from unexpected and dangerous adventures in which the characters were participants.
Old Russian literature, which had a religious character and aimed at revealing the truths of the Christian faith, until the 17th century. I didn’t know fiction, which was considered unhealthy and sinful. Events that were incredible from the point of view of the physical and biological laws of life (for example, miracles in the lives of saints) were perceived as true.
Different literary movements did not have the same attitude towards artistic fiction. Classicism, realism stories naturalism they demanded authenticity, verisimilitude and limited the writer’s imagination: the arbitrariness of the author’s imagination was not welcomed. Baroque, romanticism, modernism favorably regarded the author's right to depict events that are incredible from the point of view of ordinary consciousness or the laws of earthly life.
Fiction is diverse. He can not deviate from the verisimilitude of the image Everyday life, as in realistic novels, but can also completely break with the requirements of compliance with reality, as in many modernist novels (for example, in the novel by the Russian symbolist writer A. White"Petersburg"), as in literary fairy tales(for example, in the tales of the German romantic E. T. A. Hoffman, in the tales of the Danish writer H.C. Andersen, in the fairy tales of M. E . Saltykova-Shchedrin) or in works related to fairy tales in the novel genre - fantasy(for example, in the novels of J. Tolkien and K. Lewis). Fiction is an integral feature of historical novels, even if all their heroes are real persons. In literature, the boundaries between artistic fiction and authenticity are very conditional and fluid: they are difficult to draw in the genre memoirs, artistic autobiographies, literary biographies, telling about the lives of famous people.
Literature and language. Modern illustrated encyclopedia. - M.: Rosman. Edited by prof. Gorkina A.P. 2006 .
See what “artistic fiction” is in other dictionaries:
artistic fiction- see fiction... Terminological dictionary-thesaurus on literary criticism
artistic fiction- a means of creating artistic images: a form of recreation and display of life inherent only in art in plots and images that do not have a direct correlation with reality. Measure V. x. in a work may be different: there is an attitude towards... ... Dictionary of literary terms
FICTION- ARTISTIC FICTION, the activity of the writer’s imagination, which acts as a formative force and leads to the creation of plots and images that have no direct correspondence in previous art and reality. Discovering creative energy... ... Literary encyclopedic dictionary
FICTION- a specific act of artistic creativity that contributes to the construction of conceivable and possible options being, the idea of what can and should be. The productive properties of V. are based on the work of the imagination (Artistic Imagination),... ... Aesthetics: Vocabulary
If he stained his pants with different colors, he wouldn't lie to you about it, but he would still make it look like he got dirty by rolling down the rainbow. Mark Twain poetic work the probable impossible is preferable to... ... Consolidated encyclopedia of aphorisms
General category of arts. creativity, a means and form of mastering life through art. An image is often understood as an element or part of a work that has a kind of self-worth. existence and meaning (for example, in literature, the image of a character, ... ... Philosophical Encyclopedia
fiction- sla, m. 1) only units. In artistic creativity: a figment of the writer’s imagination, something created by his imagination. It is impossible to write without fiction... (A.N. Tolstoy). Artistry without fiction is impossible and does not exist (Gorky). Synonyms: fanta/zia 2)… … Popular dictionary of the Russian language
The general category of artistic creativity: the form of reproduction, interpretation and mastery of life inherent in art (See Art) by creating aesthetically affecting objects. An image is often understood as an element or part... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia
Sla; m. 1. That which is created by imagination, fantasy. Artistic, poetic, creative c. 2. Fiction, fabrication, lie. Idle fiction. Philistine fiction. Distinguish in. from the truth. Don't believe fiction... encyclopedic Dictionary
fiction- sla; m. 1) That which is created by imagination, fantasy. Artistic, poetic, creative you/thought. 2) Fiction, fabrication, lie. Idle fiction. Philistine fiction. Distinguish you/thought from the truth. Don't believe fiction... Dictionary of many expressions
Books
- Code "Perfumer" Patrick Suskind. Truth and fiction in the text of the famous novel, Borzenko S.. In this small (pocket-sized) book you will find the answers that arise in the attentive reader famous novel Patrick Suskind "Perfumer. The Story of a Murderer". Did you have...
It's fiction a figment of the author’s imagination (fantasy), the creation of plots and images that have no direct correspondence in previous art and reality. Through fiction, a writer embodies his view of the world and also demonstrates creative energy. The activity of a writer’s imagination, as S. Freud spoke about, is often generated by unsatisfied drives and suppressed desires driven into the subconscious. Along with relying on facts directly observed by the writer, the use of prototypes and mythological, historical, literary sources, fiction constitutes the most important and universally significant method of artistic generalization, without which art is unimaginable, because it is based on “the ability to endow productivity with the power of imagination” (Humboldt V. Language and philosophy of culture). Consistent and complete rejection of fiction puts creativity on the border with other forms of literary activity (philosophical essays, documentary information, journalism), and even takes it beyond the limits of verbal art in the strict sense; artistry without the participation of fiction, according to M. Gorky, “is impossible, does not exist.” Fiction in literature is invaluable as a means of creating an organic, holistic imaginative world; with his constant participation, “labyrinths of connections” are created (L. Tolstoy), possessing semantic richness and aesthetic expressiveness. At the same time, fiction is not arbitrary fantasy: it has certain boundaries. Fiction appears in literature either as a conjecture (often inconspicuous) of mythological and historical sources (ancient drama, Old Russian story) or life prototypes (autobiographical works; “War and Peace” by L.N. Tolstoy; many stories by N.S. Leskov), or in the form of active transformation of the material and demonstrating the flight of imagination with the help of conventional forms (works of Dante and J. Milton, J. Swift, N.V. Gogol).
The sphere of fiction is the individual components of the form of a work (coincidences of circumstances that make up the plot; unique individual traits of characters and their behavior; everyday details and their combinations), but not the initial principles of form-building. The latter are determined by extra-artistic reality and, above all, by the forms of nature and culture (in in a broad sense), acting as life analogues of imagery (for example, the comic in the “low” genres of ancient and medieval literature as a refraction of carnival laughter; an adventurous plot as a reflection of adventurous human behavior; artistic tropes as the embodiment of people’s associative ability; the syntax of artistic speech as the implementation of the expression of colloquial and oratorical statements). Fiction is not included in the sphere of artistic content, which is predetermined by the spiritual world of the writer and primary reality (mainly ideological life and the psychology of society): the author, in the words of M.M. Bakhtin, “predestines” his hero, but cannot “invent” him ( Bakhtin M.M. Aesthetics of verbal creativity).
In the early stages of verbal art, still involved in the mythological worldview, the fiction was pronounced and acted as an unrestrained fantasy, but it was not recorded by consciousness. Life and artistic truth in folklore, literature of antiquity and the Middle Ages were usually not distinguished; the events of traditions, legends, epic poems, chronicles, and lives were thought to have taken place; these genres constituted the realm of unconscious fiction. Significant milestone a fairy tale appeared from conscious fiction, which came into spontaneous contradiction with the mythologized consciousness and anticipated later genres in that it “is never presented as reality” (Propp V.Ya. Folklore and reality). The ever-living fairytale principle, the core of which is the most active fiction, artistically embodies the most cherished human aspirations. Subjects fairy tales distance and free people from a reality that does not satisfy them, encourage a person to hope (guess) that “he can really contribute to the decoration and multiplication of the riches of creation” (Tolkien).
Already the ancient Greek thinkers, who understood poetry primarily as imitation, also recognized the rights of fiction, which, according to Plato, is present in myth; according to Aristotle, the poet speaks not about the past, but about the possible; The role of artistic imagination in the Hellenistic era was more persistently noted. The historical formation of fiction took place mainly in the form of proactive conjecture of myths (ancient tragedy) and historical legends(songs about exploits, sagas, epics). For the strengthening of individual fiction, the serious-comical genres of late antiquity ("") were especially favorable, where authors, having come into contact with reality close to them, were freed from the power of legend. Fiction is clearly recognized in courtly and animal epics, fablio and other forms of short stories of the Western European Middle Ages, which in the main genres ancient Russian literature(military stories, lives of saints) did not exist until the 17th century: the authors thought of themselves as keepers of tradition, but not writers.
The increase in the activity of fiction in the literature of the New Age was preceded by Dante's The Divine Comedy (1307-21). Traditional images and plots are dramatically transformed in the works of G. Boccaccio and W. Shakespeare; unprecedentedly dared fiction in the stories of F. Rabelais. In the literature of pre-romanticism and especially romanticism, he showed himself with maximum completeness and brightness. Here fiction is recognized as the most important property of poetry, whereas earlier (especially in the aesthetics of classicism) verbal art was understood as a reliable recreation of nature; traditional orientation towards literary examples of the past as modern norm began to be opposed to “writing according to its own laws” (Kleist G. Selected). Based on mythological, folklore and literary sources writers of the first third of the 19th century updated and transformed their very meaning: I.V. Goethe turned to old plots and images in order to fill them with new content each time (“Faust”, 1808-31); A.S. Pushkin’s work is replete with borrowings, imitations, reminiscences, and quotations, while remaining deeply original. In the 20th century, the tendency to update and rethink traditional images and motifs was inherited in the dramaturgy of I.F. Annensky and Yu. O’Neill. Zh. "(1929-40) M.A. Bulgakova, historical novels T. Wilder. At the same time, invented images and plots widely exist in literature that have no direct analogues either in history or previous literature, or in the reality close to the writers (the plots of the stories of E.T.A. Hoffman, E.A. Poe, N.V., marked by fantasticality and exoticism). .Gogol, poems by J. Byron, A.S. Pushkin, M.Yu. The understanding of poetry as “writing” is associated with the authors’ focus on an original generalization, often with their claim to complete spiritual independence, and sometimes with elitist aspirations. In the era of romanticism, new boundaries of fiction also emerged: the author’s focus on mastering close reality and self-expression aroused the energy of direct observation of life and introspection, so that the characters of the work often imprinted the features of the author’s immediate environment (Byron’s poems).
IN realistic literature 19-20 centuries, which sharply reduced the distance between primary reality and artistic world, fiction often gives way to the reproduction of facts and people personally known to the author. Selectively including real persons and real events in their works, quietly conjecturing and “rearranging” them, writers of the 19th century (following the sentimentalists) often preferred real facts to fictional ones and sometimes emphasized the advantage of writing “from life” (S.T. Aksakov, N. S. Leskov). The late Tolstoy, doubting the possibilities of art, subjected fiction to harsh judgment: “It is ashamed to write a lie, that something happened that did not happen. If you want to say something, say it directly” (Complete Works). F.M. Dostoevsky also gave preference to “nature” over V., noting, however, that adequate reproduction of a single fact cannot exhaust its essence. “Trace another, even not so bright at first glance, fact of real life - and if only you are strong and have an eye, you will find in it a depth that Shakespeare does not have... But, of course, we will never exhaust the entire phenomenon, not get to the end and the beginning of it. We are familiar only with the vital, visible and current, and even then only visually, but the end and the beginning are still fantastic for a person” (Dostoevsky F.M. On Art). What is depicted by a realist writer is, as a rule, an organic fusion of the fictional and the non-fictional. Thus, A.P. Chekhov relied in his works on persons, events, everyday details drawn from the surrounding reality, and at the same time rearranged what he saw beyond recognition; T. Mann spoke about the “stimulating effect of facts” and “living details” on his work, in the fruits of which primary reality, however, is dramatically transformed (T. Mann. Letters).
In the 20th century, fiction was repeatedly criticized as a phenomenon that had exhausted itself and was forced to give way to the “literature of fact.” This look harkens back to the avant-garde aesthetic of the 1920s. In the literature of the 20th century, fiction is very clearly manifested (along with fairy tales) in works marked by the conventionality of images and catchy generalizations (the romantic works of M. Gorky, “City of Grads”, 1928, A.P. Platonov). The currently predominant sphere of open active fiction is the genres of detective fiction, adventure literature, and science fiction. The types and forms of use of fiction in literature, as can be seen, are very diverse: writers can talk about what really happened, and about the possible (Aristotle), and, on the contrary, about the impossible.