Combining Spatial Models In “The Terracotta Old Woman” Novel By E.Chizhova

Abstract

There are different approaches to the issue of literary space in modern literary studies. The typological approach is the most productive one, reflecting the fundamental parameters of the author’s worldview and performing genus, genre, and style functions. This approach also provides for identifying and describing basic spatial images and models, which are the basis of the world of literary fiction in the work of literature. The study of literary space in close connection with the event-related level, the system of spatial relationships between characters, the spatial point of view of the author and their characters, other significant components of the literary text allows one to penetrate deeper into its ideological content, understand characters and their inner state, come closer to the disclosure of the author's idea. Having selected basic models which represent the “objectively existing” and suitable for living environment (real space), characterize the inner world of characters (psychological space) and build a fictional reality (virtual space), we focus on the study of mixed models, taking into account the fact that there is always an experiment in the so-called "strong" texts. This research paper materials are based on “The Terracotta Old Woman” novel (2011), written by E. Chizhova, the Booker Prize winner. The paper describes structural and semantic types of space, according to the content and functional criterion (geographical, cultural, family, social and psychological models), which identify the general principles of artistic vision and determine the value of each spatial components in stylistic harmony.

Keywords: ChronotopeE Chizhovaliterary spacespatial analysisspatial model

Introduction

The review of numerous works (Bachelard & Jolas, 1994; Bakhtin, 1975; Epstein, 1990; Gao, 2016; Farino, 2004; Lotman, 2000; Mints, 1999; Niekerk, 2017; Saveleva, 1996; Shutaia, 2007; Toporov, 1995 and others), devoted to the spatial analysis of a literary text, allowed one to identify several research levels, allocated depending on their content and volume of the material in question:

- Level 1 deals with the analysis of the most significant spatial images (home, road, city, manor, forest, garden, etc.) in a particular literary text or works of an author in general;

- Level 2 describes the individual author's specificity for the spatial organization of literary works;

- Level 3 aims at identifying common patterns while portraying literary space in the literary process of a particular epoch;

- Level 4 constructs various classifications and typologies of literary space in literature.

The most topical and promising, in our opinion, is the fourth research level, because it provides for summarizing the accumulated experience, theoretically interpreting each problem and linking together numerous concepts in the course of studying a literary text in the spatial aspect.

Back in the 1930s, M. Bakhtin developed a typology of spatio-temporal patterns (chronotopes) of a novel in the early stages of its development. The genre principle underlying the classification allowed the researcher to describe the largest spatio-temporal models: chronotopes of Greek novels and chivalric romances, Rabelaisian and idyllic chronotopes, as well as currently repeated chronotopical images (meetings, roads, castles, saloon-living rooms, provincial towns, et al.), being the main scenes of action in different types of a novel (Bakhtin, 1975).

Another approach to the typology of literary space structural-semiotic is presented in works of Lotman (1986, 2000), Toporov (1984, 1995, 1997), Farino (2004) and others. Considering space apart from time, representatives of this direction distinguish and characterize major spatial patterns based on their inclusion into binary oppositions: closed/open, homogeneous/heterogeneous, filled / empty, conflicting / non-conflicting, moral/immoral, etc.

Finally, the third approach combines both directions of research, as scientists build different classifications, highlighting and describing the genus, genre and style-forming spatial models: historical, geographical, mythological, fantastic, etc., within which they analyze key spatial oppositions. We are adopting this very approach, however, the main attention is paid not to the so-called “pure” spatial models, but to the mixed ones, which are most often found in new and recent literature. Basically, we consider models depicting the “objectively existing” and suitable for living environment (geographical, family, social space, etc.), describing the characters’ mental world, representing this world as a kind of microcosm (psychological space), constructing fictional structures, consciously pushing the boundaries of conventionality (virtual, oneiric, surreal, etc. of space) (Pykhtina, 2014, 2015, 2017).

Problem Statement

The main research objective of this paper is to illustrate our literary concept for the typological study of the literary space on the specific example.

Research Questions

The selection of a representative text for further analysis, where several spatial models coexisting in stylistic harmony and influencing the idea of the work in general would be found together.

Identification of “mixed” spatial models in the structure of a modern novel.

Determination of the role of spatial models identified in an individual author's concept.

Purpose of the Study

This study is aimed at conducting the spatial-temporal analysis of the contemporary literature, where one can see the combination and interposition of various spatial models, due to which the problem-thematic and ideological content of the text is appreciably deepened.

Research Methods

In the course of the work, structural-typological and functional-semantic research methods were used, which made it possible to identify key spatial models in the work in question, figure out their main functions and describe the links between multi-level word pictures.

Findings

We illustrated our concept on the basis of “The Terracotta Old Woman” novel, written by Chizhova (2011), the winner of the Booker Prize from St. Petersburg. In this particular novel space is presented as multidimensional and multifunctional.

This novel is a first-person narration, on behalf of Tatiana, a striking and outstanding individual, who has reached an impasse, both moral and material. Tatiana used to work as a university lecturer, then she became a successful business-lady, and now she is a Russian language tutor, bored with her social role. Her painful self-reflection is given in the form of memories about events which happened twenty years ago, interwoven with sketches of her life in the present. In the 1990s, Tatiana, educated by her parents-philologists, on the examples from Russian classical literature, left her job at university and started working as a personal assistant for a successful entrepreneur and an owner of a furniture factory. This was a necessary measure; she had to support her small daughter and her friend Yana who was left alone without a job with a son to bring him up. However, being “crazy about literature”, Tatiana could never adapt to the “bestial world”, where, to survive, you need to “fight to the bitter end”. Comparing herself to a terracotta old woman (an archaic statuette depicting an ugly woman with a big belly), the main character of the novel by Chizhova (2011) emphasizes her tragic needlessness in the new world, built on the other, not at all humanistic, concepts.

In the course of the analysis, we found out that the disclosure of the internal conflict of the main character could be facilitated by the detailed characteristics of the literary space, namely, geographical, cultural, family, social and psychological. Let us take a closer look at how these models are presented in the text and what their functions are.

Conclusion

While analyzing the chronotope in the novel by Chizhova from the structural-typological and functional-semantic perspective, we managed to identify and consider the geographical, cultural, family, social and psychological types of space which, overlapping each other in the heroine’s consciousness, contribute to the disclosure of her “self” relations with the outside world, allow one to transfer all the nuances of her crisis of internal state.

In our opinion, the proposed aspect of the study complements the approaches to spatial analysis already developed in literary criticism, helps to understand the deeper layers of the literary text and come closer to understanding individual author's concept.

References

• Bachelard, G., & Jolas, M. (2014). The poetics of space. NY: Penguin Books.
• Bakhtin, M. M. (1975). Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane [Forms of time and chronotope in the novel]. Ocherki po istoricheskoj poetike [Issues of historical poetics]. In Questions of literature and aesthetics (pp. 234-408). Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura.
• Chizhova, E. S. (2011). The terracotta old woman. Moscow: ASТ, Astrel.
• Epstein, М. N. (1990). “Priroda, mir, tajnik vselennoj”: Sistema pejzazhnykh obrazov v russkoj poezii [«Nature, world, and the mystery of universe»: The system of landscape images in Russian poetry]. Moscow: Vysshaya Shkola.
• Farino, Е. (2004). Vvedenie v literaturovedenie: Uchebnoe posobie [Introduction to theory and history of literature: Teaching guide]. St. Petersburg: Publishing House of Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia.
• Gao, J. H. (2016). On the narrative chronotope and its ethical values in Kuprin's novels written in Russia. Foreign Literature Studies, 38, 104–111.
• Lotman, Iu. M. (1986). K probleme prostranstvennoj semiotiki. [To the problem of space semiotics]. Semiotika prostranstva i prostranstvo semiotiki. Trudy po znakovym sistemam [Semiotics of space and space of semiotics. Works on Semiotic Systems], Tartu State University Bulletin, XIX (720), 3–6.
• Lotman, Iu. M. (2000). Semiosphere. St-Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPb Publ.
• Mints, Z. G. (1999). Blok i russkij simvolizm. Kniga 1: Poetika Aleksandra Bloka [Blok and Russian symbolism. Book 1. Aleksandr Blok’s Poetics]. SPb.: Iskusstvo- SPb.
• Niekerk, C. (2017). Colonial/postcolonial chronotopes in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's “The Girl from the Coast”. Symposium (A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures), 71, 14–27.
• Pykhtina, Iu. G. (2017). Mental spatial images in literary text. Modern Journal of Language Teaching Methods (MJLTM), 7(9), 19-32.
• Pykhtina, Iu. G. (2014). K probleme klassifikacii prostranstvennykh obrazov i modelej v khudozhestvennoj literature [То the problem of classification of spatial images and models in literature]. GISAP: Philological Sciences, 3, 62-64.
• Pykhtina, Iu. G. (2015). Tipologiia bazovykh prostranstvennykh modelej v khudozhestvennoj literature [Typology of basic spatial models in fiction literature]. GISAP: Philological Sciences, 8, 59-63.
• Saveleva, V. V. (1996). Khudozhestvennyj tekst i khudozhestvennyj mir: problemy organizacii [Literary text and literary world: Structural problems]. Almaty: LLP Dajk-Press.
• Shutaia, N. K. (2007). Tipologiia khudozhestvennogo vremeni i prostranstva v russkom romane 18-19 vv. [The typology of artistic time continuum and space in Russian novel of 18th and 19th centuries] Moscow: Lomonosov Moscow State University.
• Toporov, V. N. (1984). Peterburg i «Peterburgskij tekst russkoj literatury» (Vvedenie v temu) [Petersburg and “Russian Literature Petersburg’s Text” (Introduction)]. Trudy po znakovym sistemam [Works on Semiotic Systems], 18, 4–29.
• Toporov, V. N. (1995). Myth. Ritual. Symbol. Image: Research in the field of the mythopoetic: Selected articles. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
• Toporov, V. N. (1997). Prostranstvo [Space]. In S.A. Tokarev (Ed.), Mify narodov mira [Mythic Literature of Nations], 2 (pp. 340–342). Moscow: Rossijskaia Entsiklopedia Publishing.