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tags: Film
rel: Chronotype
Heteroglossia: referring to any utterance of any kind, to the particular interaction between the two fundamentals of all communication.
Epic and Novel - Towards a Methodology of Study of the Novel
The generic skeleton of the novel is still far from having hardened, and we cannot foresee all its plastic possibilities.
We encounter the epic as a genre that has not only long since completed its development, but one that is already antiquated. All of these genres (defining features) are older than written language Orality and Literacy - Ong and Hartley and they retail their ancient oral and auditory characteristics.
The novel is younger than writing, and the book.
A novel is distinguished by
- it’s stylistic three-dimensionality, which is linked with the multi-languaged consciousness realized in the novel
- the radical change it effects in the temporal coordinates of the literary image
- the new zone opened by the novel for structuring literary images, namely, the zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) and all its open-endedness.
Of special significance in this process of demolishing distance is the comical origin of these genres: they derive from folklore (popular laughter.) It is precisely laughter that destroys the epic and in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance. As a distanced image a subject cannot be comical; to be made comical it must be made close. Everything that makes us laugh is close at hand, all comical creativity works in a zone of maximal proximity.
Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making it an object of familiar contact and thus clear the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically.
Forms of time and the Chronotope in the Novel
We will give the name chronotope (literally, space time) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.
The Greek Romance
The plots of these romances like those of their nearest and most immediate successors, the Byzantine novels) are remarkably similar to each other, and are in fact composed of the very same elements !motifs): individual novels differ from each other only in the number of such elements, their proportionate weight within the whole plot and the way they are combined. One can easily construct a typical composite schema of this plot, taking into account the most important individual deviations and variations. Such a schema would go something like this.
The first meeting of hero and heroine and the sudden flareup of their passion for each other is the starting point for plot movement; the end point of plot movement is their successful union in marriage.
This Greek romance-time does not have even an elementary biological or maturational duration. At the novel’s outset the heroes meet each other at a marriageable age, and at the same marriageable age, no less fresh and handsome, they consummate the marriage at the novel’s end. Such a form of time, in which they experience a most improbable number of adventures, is not measured off in the novel and does not add up; it is simply days, nights, hours, moments clocked in a technical sense within the limits of each separate adventure. This time - adventure-time high intensified but undifferentiated - is not registered in the slightest way in the age of the heroes. We have here an extratemporal hiatus between two biological moments - the arousal or passion, and its satisfaction.
NOTE
There’s a knife’s edge where the series of events allow the romance as depicted to exist. Fortune.
A normal course of events is interrupted - and provides an opening for sheer chance, which has its own specific logic. This logic is one of random contingency, which is to say chance simultaneity (meetings), and chance rupture (nonmeetings).
In this random contingency, “earlier” and “later” are crucially, even decisively, significant. Should something happen a minute earlier, or a minute later, that is, should there be no chance simultaneity or chance disjunctions in time, there would be no plot at all, and nothing to write a novel about.
In general, chance is but one form of the principle of necessity and as such has a place in any novel, as it has its place in life itself.
The motif of meeting:
In any meeting the temporal marker (“at one and the same time”) is inseparable from the spatial marker (“in one and the same place”). In the negative motif (“they did not meet”, “they were parted”) the chronotopicity is retained but one or another member of the chronotype bears a negative sign: the did not meet because they did not arrive at the given place at the same time, or at the same time they were in different places. The inseparable unity of time and space markers (a unity without merging) gives to the chronotope of meeting an elementary clear, formal, almost mathematical character.
NOTE
Resolving the Stranger
A meeting is one of the most ancient devices for structuring a plot.
The Road:
Of special importance is the close link between the motif of meeting and the chronotope of the road (“the open road”), and of various types of meetings on the road. In the chronotope of the road, the unity of time and space markers is exhibited with exceptional precision and clarity. The importance of the chronotope of the road in literature is immense: it is a rare work that does not contain a variation of this motif, and many words are directly constructed on the road chronotope, and on road meetings and adventures.
In the scientific and technical realm where purely conceptual thinking predominates, there are no motifs as such, but the concept of contact is equivalent in some degree to the motif of meeting.
Metamorphosis or transformation is a mythological sheath for the idea of development - but one that unfolds not so much in a straight line as spasmodically, a line with “knots” in it, one that therefore constitutes a distinctive type of temporal sequence.
rel: River and Death
The most characteristic thing about this novel is the way it fuses the course of an individual’s life (at its major turning points) with his action spatial course or road - that is, with his wanderings. Thus is realized the metaphor “the path of life”
Philosophy of the third person in private life - the philosophy of a person who knows only private life, and craves it alone, but who does not participate in it, who has no place in it - and therefore sees it in sharp focus, as a whole in all its nakedness, playing out all its roles but not fusing his identity with any one of them.
The present and even more the past are enriched at the expense of the future. The force and the persuasiveness of reality of real life, belong to the present and the past alone - to the is and the was - and to the future belongs a reality of a different sort, one that is more ephemeral, a reality when placed in the future is deprived of that materiality and density, that real-life weightiness that is essential to the is and the was.
Chivalric Romance
Time breaks down into a sequence of adventure-fragments.
In Chivalric Romance chance has all the seductiveness of the miraculous and the mysterious; it is personified by good and evil fairies, good and evil magicians; in enchanted groves and castles and elsewhere it lies in wait.
In contrast to the Greek, the heroes are symbolic and at the same time individualized.
The Rogue, the Clown and the Fool - all feature the right to other the world. They see the underside and falseness of every situation. Therefore, they can exploit whatever position they choose but only as a mask.
Conclusion
Science, Art and literature involve semantic elements that are not subject to temporal, and spatial determinations. Of such a sort, for instance, are all mathematical concepts: we make use of them for measuring spatial and temporal phenomena but they themselves have no intrinsic spatial and temporal determinations; they are the object of our abstract cognition. But meanings exist not only in abstract cognition, they exist in artistic thought as well. These artistic meanings are likewise not subject to temporal and spatial determinations. We somehow manage however to endow all phenomena with meaning, that is, we incorporate them not only into the sphere of spatial and temporal existence but also into a semantic sphere. This process of assigning meaning also involves some assigning of value. But questions concerning the form that existence assumes in this sphere, and the nature and form of the evaluations that give sense to existence are purely philosophical.
Whatever these meanings turn out to be, in order to enter our experience (which is social experience) they must take on the form of a sign that is audible and visible for us (a hieroglyph, a mathematical formula, a verbal or linguistic expression, a sketch etc). Without such temporal-spatial expression, even abstract thought is impossible. Consequently, every entry into the sphere of meaning is accomplished only through the gates of the Chronotope.