CC BY
38
ya,K 82.01
A. Chikicheva
Candidate of Culturology, Docent
Moscow, Russia
E-mail: astra861@rambler.ru
N. Doldo
Candidate of Culturology, Docent
Chelyabinsk State University, Chelyabinsk, Russia
E-mail: natali nesterova@mail.ru
THE LITERARY CHARACTER DURING THE DIGITAL ERA: CULTURAL MEANINGS AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Abstract. Art adapts and, often, organically uses new technical capabilities of the digital era. Many synthetic genres appear, traditional ones find their informational niche in the network space. Literature is the kind of art, which, in our opinion, with relative comfort has "settled" in the digital space. In the face of collision of eras when problems of searching the relevant character are especially sharp, the reader seeks to find in literature as the invariable "textbook of life" valuable reference points of social development and models of spiritual self-determination.
To designate some tendencies in formation of the generalized image of the literary character of the digital era, we carried out the preliminary analysis of works written by Nobel laureates in literature from 2012 to 2017, which were translated to Russian language. The preliminary analysis of texts showed that the literary character appearing on pages of above-mentioned works can be called the retrohero - a person absorbed mentally in the past for one reason or another, or living there.
On the basis of the obtained data, we can highlight a number of cultural features characterizing the retrohero in general. These features are as follows: understanding the cataclysms of the 20th century through the prism of the character's life, in this case the retrohero of such kind can be called the historical witness or "the witness of a century"; the perception of occurring events at a long distance, for example, the time distance which is achieved by authors in the different ways: leaving the character in memories, transferring the character in the invented time or even killing the character; the embodiment of a value-based worldview matrix of a certain historical period or the certain country in the character personality so that the matrix is being updated as the character overcomes the offered circumstances.
Keywords: literature, modern literary process, literary character
For citing: Chikicheva A., Doldo N. 2020. The Literary Character During the Digital Era: Cultural Meanings and Social Transformations. Culture and Arts Herald. No 3 (63): 89-94.
Introduction. The "Digital Era" and the "New Media" are the terms which firmly rooted in modern science. Culturologists talk about the "digital culture", the "digital man" and even the "digital God" [15, p. 6]. In fact, all modern reality, from key events in the world to the local phenomena of everyday life, is considered taking into account the influence of information technologies with their resources and risks. The formation of the "digital era" is associated with the following processes [5, p. 20]:
1) All types of content go from physical and static analog forms to digital, becoming both mobile and personal;
2) The transition to the simple management technologies. Usability becomes the main characteristic of a technical device or technology;
3) The transition to a network structure of communication. Heterogeneity of communication channels;
4) Widespread use of "big data".
Art adapts and, often, organically uses new technical capabilities of the digital era.
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Many synthetic genres appear, traditional ones find their informational niche in the network space.
Literature is the kind of art, which, in our opinion, with relative comfort has "settled" in the digital space (however, giving way to cinema, music and the spoken genre). It existing there in two formats at the same time -"paper" (physical and static) and network -or completely going to "digit". However, the discussion here is not about the transition of literature to the digital format, not about the ways of its representation in the digital era. The subject of this article is an actual literary character, born on the pages of paper and electronic books, contextually existing in the digital era.
Theoretical framework. In the face of collision of eras when problems of searching the relevant character are especially sharp, the reader seeks to find in literature as the invariable "textbook of life" valuable reference points of social development and models of spiritual self-determination [2; 3; 11]. In this sense, designation of the writer as "engineer of human souls" corresponds to the transformative effect realized in the ideas of social engineering [2; 9; 6] - ideology and practice of spiritual transformation of the present and the design of images of the culture of the future. It is no coincidence that K. M. Cantor presents the history as a train of "paradigm projects" that are implemented through creative life designers, which include the literary geniuses of Dante and Rabelais [10].
Statement of the problem. Thus, the characterization of the time, the search for a «face» expressing its values, seems to us possible in the symbolic space of modern fiction, which is a set of ideas, philosophical constructions, a kind of code for perceiving the world, represented in the image of the literary character of the work. The subject of research in the framework of this article is the current literary character, born under the pen (or fingers above the keyboard) of the author and embodied on the pages of paper and
electronic books, contextually existing in the digital era.
Methods. To identify some trends towards the emergence of the «literary character of the digital era», we reviewed the translated into Russian language works1 written by Nobel laureates in literature from 2012 to 20172: K. Ishiguro "The Buried Giant" (2015) and "Never let me go" (2005), S. Alexievich "Second-hand Time" (2013), P. Modiano "L'Herbe des nuits" (2012) and "L'Horizon" (2010), A. Munro "Dear Life" (2012), M. Yan "Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out" (2006) and "Big Breasts and Wide Hips" (1995). Of course, such a "mixing" of the entire wide range of non-standard literary characters represented in various works and on different continents, each designed for its own target audience, is a simplification. However, the designated list can be considered as a defining vector due to the fact that the works of Nobel laureates are recognized by the world professional literary community and read by millions of readers around the world.
Discussion. Even a preliminary analysis showed that the literary character appearing on the pages of the above-mentioned works can be called a retrohero - a person mentally immersed in the past for one reason or another, or living there. An exception is the novel "Never let me go" by Kazuo Ishiguro, where the characters are people who are "raised to organs" (the ethical problem of the future and, in part, of the present). Let us briefly describe the characters presented in the works.
The action of K. Ishiguro's novel "The Buried Giant" takes place in medieval England and is endowed with the characteristic features of fantasy. His characters are an elderly couple wandering in search of a son whom they had not seen for many years. However, according to the author himself, the story of the dragon and the fog of oblivion
1 The works published after 2000.
2 The exception is made for the winner of 2016 Bob Dylan because the characters within his works have a bit different nature; it is possible to call them the lyrical characters.
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allegorically considers the conflict with China and South Asia during the Second World War. In an interview, K. Ishiguro says: "The Japanese have decided to forget that they were aggressors and all the things that the Japanese imperial army did in China and South Asia in those years" [14]. The characters of the novel are faced with the problem of collective cultural memory and guilt, "mass psychological trauma", ways of forgetting and remembering it.
The character of the works of S. Alexievich is Homo Soveticus, as the author herself calls him. This is a man «born in the USSR», combining a strong faith in a leader and a party, living with the ideas of communism, not alien to petty-possessive squabbles and neighborly betrayal, but ready to make his contribution to building a bright future. «Some people think that this is a tragic character, others call him a «scoop». I think I know this man, he is well acquainted with me, I lived next to him, side by side for many years. He is me. He is my acquaintances, friends, parents», writes S. Alexievich [1].
In the works of Patrick Modiano, the character is immersed in memories. His whole life consists of them, «floating like clouds». The novels examined describe Paris in the 60s of the last century, and the character himself tries to solve the riddles of the past with his own memory only. According to S. Sirotin, "for thirty-five years, Modiano has never changed the plot scheme, which allows us to say that he writes one book all his life" [13, p. 19]. With one character
The books of Alice Ann Munro describe the period about 1930-1970 in the Canadian province - the time and place well known to the writer. "In Munro's small texts, the plot is secondary, the depth of the character's experiences, or rather the heroine's, is important, since it is mainly about women's destinies" [16]. Despite the fact that A. Munro published many collections in the 80s of the last century, interest in this kind of character arose just now.
Mo Yan's novels are a kind of «chronicle of the history of China in the 20th century» [17]. One of the novels published in Russian from this series - "Big Breasts, Wide Heaps" (1995) is dedicated to the writer's mother [7] and all women who were able to raise their children and others during the war and post-war periods. The novel "Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out" - is a continuation of the author's grandiose plan to create the "art history of China". The character of this novel is innocently shot during the 1950 land reform (it is important to note that active land transformations began in China after the defeat of Japanese troops in 1946). "A proud soul who is indignant at its murderers will not be accepted into the underworld -and the character will return to the world again and again, in different guises will hate and love, fight to the bloody wounds for his truth, admire the apricot blossom in the moonlight" [17].
The trend towards the emergence of a retrohero also exists in modern Russian literature. By analyzing the short lists of the most prestigious Russian literary awards and contests and comparing them with sales ratings, we compiled a list of 20 works that have official awards and hold the first lines of the sales rating for several years [18].
It is worth noting that in 15 out of 20 works, the literary character refers to the type of retrohero. The character "Homo Soveticus" is presented in the novel by X. Buksha "The Freedom Factory". The characters of V. Sharov's novel "Return to Egypt", Z. Prilepin's "The Abode", documentaries of L. Yuzefovich's "Winter Road", L. Danilkin "Lenin: Pantocrator of Solar Dust" are "embodied history", recreating the "lost" events of the past century. The issues of "women's fate" in the pre-war and post-war periods are raised in the novels by G. Yakhina "Zuleikha" and N. Abgaryan "Three Apples Fell from the Sky". Immersion in the memories of past events is feature of the characters of the works written by E. Vodolazkin «The
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Aviator» and L. Ulitskaya 'Jacob's Ladder" and "Holy Trash". The transfer of characters into fictional times (in different versions of the Russian Middle Ages) is used by E. Vodolazkin in the novel "Laurus" and V. Sorokin in the novel "Telluria". The retrohero whose fate is connected with the problems of preserving the Orthodox tradition in Soviet times -the saint [4] - is presented in the works of O. Nikolaeva "Heavenly Fire" and Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov) "Everyday Saints and Other Stories".
Conclusion. Summarizing, we can highlight a number of cultural features characterizing the retrohero in general:
1. Understanding the cataclysms of the 20th century through the prism of the character's life. The vast majority of stories are somehow connected with the Second World War, its consequences, presented through the life experience of the characters of the stories;
2. Perception of occurring events at a long distance; a retrohero of this type can be called a historical witness or "witness of the century" [18]. The time distance is achieved in various ways - by leaving the character in memories, transferring the character in the invented time or even killing the character;
3. The embodiment of a value-based worldview matrix of a certain historical period or the certain country in the character personality so that the matrix is being updated as the character overcomes the offered circumstances.
Concluding our short review, we ask ourselves why in the digital era retroheroes are most in demand. Without claiming a definite answer, it is only worth noting that the development of high technology does not cancel, but actualizes issues of a value-based worldview nature more and more. At the collision of eras, characters are searching the value foundations of their own lives, going in search of them even in the past. As noted by A. G. Chernyshov in the article "Global Politics in the Digital Age: Value-based Foundations
and Technologies of Saving Semantic Data", the inclusion of value-worldview foundations in a digital culture "can be achieved by saving the particles of value-based knowledge and meanings that can be simply "trampled" and forgotten when changing milestones" [4, p. 89].
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Received 31.08.2020
А. Ю. Чикичева
кандидат культурологии, доцент
Москва, Россия
E-mail: astra861@rambler.ru
Н. В. Долдо
кандидат культурологии, доцент
Челябинский государственный университет, Челябинск, Россия
E-mail: natali nesterova@mail.ru
Литературный герой в цифровую эпоху
Искусство адаптируется и часто органично использует новые технические возможности цифровой эпохи. Возникает много синтетических жанров, традиционные находят свою информационную нишу в сетевом пространстве. Литература — это искусство, которое, на наш взгляд, относительно комфортно «поселилось» в цифровом пространстве. Перед лицом столкновения эпох, когда особенно остро стоят проблемы поиска релевантного персонажа, читатель стремится найти в литературе как неизменном «учебнике жизни» ценные ориентиры общественного развития и модели духовного самоопределения.
Для обозначения некоторых тенденций в формировании обобщенного образа литературного персонажа цифровой эпохи нами был проведен предварительный анализ переведенных на русский язык произведений нобелевских лауреатов по литературе с 2012 по 2017 г., показавший, что литературного персонажа на страницах упомянутых произведений можно назвать ретрогероем — человеком, по тем или иным причинам мысленно погруженным в прошлое или живущим там.
На основании полученных данных можно выделить ряд культурных особенностей, характеризующих ретрогероя в целом: понимание катаклизмов ХХ в. через призму жизни персонажа (в данном случае такого ретрогероя можно назвать историческим свидетелем или «свидетелем века»); восприятие происходящих событий на большом расстоянии (например, временном), которого авторы достигают разными способами: оставляя персонажа в воспоминаниях, перенося его в придуманное время или даже убивая; воплощение ценностной матрицы мировоззрения определенного исторического периода или определенной страны в личности персонажа, так что матрица обновляется по мере того, как персонаж преодолевает предложенные обстоятельства.
Ключевые слова: литература, современный литературный процесс, литературный персонаж
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Для цитирования: Chikicheva, A. The Literary Character During the Digital Era: Cultural
Meanings and Social Transformations = Литературный герой в цифровую эпоху / A. Chikicheva,
N. Doldo //Вестник культуры и искусств. — 2020. — № 3 (63). — С. 89—94. (На англ. яз.).
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Получено 31.08.2020
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