Meta-narrative strategies in V. Makanin's prose

Metanarratives as narrative unities, which are held together by a specific causality of the composition, allow establishing semantic relations between texts at any level of integrity - from axiological generalized outlook (M.N. Darwin) to communicative mental sets of genre, scope and authorship (V.S. Kiselyov). Literary critics differentiated individual tendencies of image-theme convergences in V. Makanin's prose of various years: reverse reflections of plots and repeatability of situations (N. Ivanova), attraction to a particular type of hero - gatherer of wordly material and acting entity (I. Rodnyanskaya), median (L. Anninskiy) and book-worm (A. Genis). Alongside with that, the logic of bringing V. Makanin's texts into groups requires systemic descriptions of the author's narrative strategies. Gravitation towards stable names, which generated the paratexts of Svetik-novel and Klyucharyov-novel; towards the prevailing motives of demand, guilt and judgment; towards self-determination in chronotopes of being late, return, book-worming; towards the psychology of non-judging - all these facilitate the identification of the writer's prose metalevels. Also, the structural unity of discretionary compositions, the genre metanarrative of a novel, a short novel or a story claims the capability of the metanarrative principle. One of the essential matters of metaconvergence is the discourse of a creative mind. Self-description of the creative process, its mechanisms and psychological impulses in Makanin's writings becomes incarnated in formulas of failure and reflection on one's unpublished short novel, an undrawn portrait, a forgotten story, a lost text or a rejection to write any more. From the point of view of narratology proper, the speech situation of the text about text is also a stable metanarrative. Self-axiology, irony, escaping quotations and intellectualism are valuable for determination of the style metalevel. The short novel Voices (Golosa) or the novel Underground, or Hero of Our Times, are independent metanarratives, which concentrate thematic, stylistic, axiological and ideal-artistic thesaurus of Makanin's prose. Proverbial metadiscourse, which unites a significant text corpus with a greater-than-average intellectual resource and reflects the author's outlook on the reality, performs an integrating function. Formal subjectivation of Makanin's narrative with graphic emphasis - brackets, italics and capital letters is yet awaiting a dedicated literary study. The specific feature of the united set is passed onto many writings based on the principle of pretext isolation, in dialogue with which the author weaves his plot. In particular, Makanin's interlocutors include F. Nietzsche, M, Heidegger, A. Schopenhauer, Z. Freud and virtually all of the classic literary elite. Positioning of Makanin's works among conceptual metanarrative strategies may become one of the prospective directions in Makanin's studies and literary studies in general, which will bring the researcher toward identification of universal regularities in inherent integration of the author's texts, as well as artistic systems and culture texts

Keywords

Authors

References