Original scientific paper
Poetics of Language and Space in the Narrative Discourses in The Crying of Lot 49 and V.
Milena Mrdak Mićović
; University of Montenegro - Faculty of Philology
Abstract
The objective of the essay is to, using the methodology of phenomenological and semiotic interpretation, suggest and then illustrate how the postmodernist structure of Pynchon’s novels The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and V. (1963) incline contemporary readers’ perception and discourse analysis towards the definition of interpretation that a text gets realized in the reader himself. The enigma offered by this author, the specific realization of metaphor, personification, and parody of reality, would not have been realized without linguistic interventions which make anything possible. Pun, anti-logic, unusual sentence combinatorics, drama, and expressiveness that, contrary to expectations, do not lead to the unfolding, but the anticlimax or dystrophic end of the event, are, in fact, means of portraying characters accustomed to living in a meaningless and chaotic world, not trying or not doing enough to fix the systems and change the routine. The poetics of language is seen as reciprocal to their dispersive internal states, and the chronotope organized by such language and such characters is also correlated with nonsense. Anti-novels that promote anti-heroes as the basic component of construction nurture precisely the language that is the instrument of provocation and exposure of reality; therefore such narrative reality is also an anti-reality that, in a way, opposes the existing one. The fragmentation of expression speaks of the de-canonization of the creative process, a key feature of the modern novel, precisely in the era of postmodernism. Deconstruction has conditioned the creation of difficult-to-read or so-called printable text. The very types that arise from non-canonical literary procedures are hybrid, therefore, free in terms of genre and constant communication with other texts. The language of the absurd is spoken by absurd characters whose names are the function of symbols, and who live in an absurd time, and novels that revitalize all of the above are novels of the absurd, which are precisely Pynchon’s novels as expressive narrative speculations.
Keywords
Thomas Pynchon; language interventions; calembour; anacoluthon; the poetics of language; the poetics of space; narrative speculation
Hrčak ID:
247744
URI
Publication date:
13.12.2020.
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