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Концепт фантастического сообщества и его конкретные формы реализации в общественном сознании
Айвазова Эльвера Рустемовна,
кандидат филологических наук, доцент кафедры иностранных языков, ФГБОУ ВО «Российский государственный университет правосудия»
В статье рассматривается становление попытки теоретической спецификации английской сатирической традиции. Главное внимание уделено теоретическому аспекту проблемы и своеобразию сатирической типизации в английской литературе, в последовательном абстрагировании от представления о воплощении социального идеала вреальной жизни. Предложен концепт «фантастического сообщества» как ключевой при решении вопроса о национальной специфике сатирического дискурса, а также накопившиеся в процессе изучения национальных литератур факты наличия неких силовых линий, по которым движется мировой литературный процесс, конкретно-исторический характер репрезентации в каждой отдельной литературе даже наиболее общих эстетических (поэтических) категорий.
Ключевые слова: сатира, юмор, сообщество, тип, дискурс, типизация.
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The steady interest in comparative methodology in modern literary studies is explained by the fact that the accumulated facts in the process of studying national literatures have made it obvious, first that there are certain lines of force along which the world literary process moves, and, secondly, the concrete - historical character of representation in each separate literature of even the most general aesthetic (poetic) categories.
This thesis fully retains its meaning in relation to one of the oldest modes of artistic speech: satire. If the individual characteristics of satirical thinking inherent in individual writers have often attracted the attention of researchers, then national-historical generalizations of this kind, if we keep in mind the theoretical side of the issue, remain for the most part only urgently needed.
This article is an attempt at a theoretical specification of the English satirical tradition.
In the last third of the seventeenth century, satire flourished in England. The general characteristic of the worldview of the European man of that time is found in Yu Wipper: "The Renaissance personality is characterized by spiritual harmony, unity, the fusion of the principles of the personal and social, due at the same time to their non-separateness. For the inner world of a person depicted by the literature of the XVII century, on the contrary, the struggle, often the direct antagonism of these principles, is indicative.
Reflections of such a conflict can be found in the works of the French classicists (the clash of individual rights and the demands of public duty, which sometimes takes on an objectively insoluble character), and in Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus (the image of the suffering of the people and their aspirations), and in Milton's Paradise Lost (the spontaneous, fraught with internal tragedy and full of hidden dialectics, the revolt of heroes against blind submission to authority as the ideological grain of the poem) «[3: 22].
The true rise of the satirical trend occurred in English literature in the XVIII century. It is to this time that researchers attribute the formation of the national satirical tradition itself: "By the end of the seventeenth century, English has rooted itself as a native tradition. Authours of the next fifty years, publishing from Samuel Garth's The Dispencery (1699-1718) to Samuel Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), create another Augustan age, for this period rivals imperial Rome in its elevation of satiric poetry into a national idiom" [8: 212].
A truly colossal figure, a world-class figure, was Jonathan Swift. His work, which reached the top in «The Tale of the Barrel» and «Gulliver's Travels», rivals the greatest masterpieces of English realistic lit-
erature in its significance. According to its artistic features, Swift's work is entirely determined by the laws of satire. The generalizing allegorical satirical meaning of his «The Tale of the Barrel» and «Gulliver's Travels» is much more important to him than those genre, concrete-everyday life details that the creators of the English realistic essay and the novel of the Enlightenment will look at with such enthusiasm and curiosity.
On Swift's initiative, several talented English satirists (Arbuthnot, Gay, and Pop) formed a literary circle called the Martin Scriblerus Circle (i.e., the Scribblers), which was formed around the time the Tories came to power. Swift, Pope, Gay, Parnell, Congreve, Arbuthnot, and others gathered in Arbuthnot's rooms at St. James's Palace. These meetings were also attended by Tory leaders - Gurley and others. The purpose of the circle was to create a satire on the various forms of pedantry and false science, embodied in the image of Scriblerus-Scribbler. The first volume of the Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus was published only in 1741 - six years after Arbuthnot's death - in the second volume of Pope's prose works: «The Memoirs tells of the birth and upbringing of Martin, who was lucky enough to be the son of an antiquarian scholar. (...) Martin's father, in order to raise him according to the ancient model, decides that, like Hercules, the cradle of his son should serve as a shield. This is followed by a parody of classical education: Martin's gingerbread is stamped with the Greek alphabet, he plays only Greek games, and his clothes are a geographical map. Martin becomes a critic, then studies medicine, investigates mental illnesses, seeks to discover the seat of the soul, etc. At the end, he goes on a journey. Such works as Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Pope's Dunciad are connected with the collective idea of Martin Scriblerus, which grew out of separate parts of the general plan» [4: 241].
The very fact of Swift's joining any community is very interesting. To make this clear, here is an excerpt from his letter to Pope: «I have always hated all sorts of societies, sects and fraternities; I love with all my heart just people, each one individually - for example, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love the adviser Name and the judge Name; the same applies to doctors (I'm not talking about my fellow writers), the military, the English, the Scots, the French, and all the rest. But in general, I hate and despise the brute called a man, although I love this, that, or the other from the bottom of my heart. .I have collected materials for a treatise proving that the term «animal rationale» is incorrect and that it is correct to say «rationis sarach» [6: 232].
A powerful incentive to the development of satirical discourse was the political inter-party competition. In a sense, the classic example of such competition is the struggle between the Whigs and the Tories. It shows the productivity of the approach to satire as an aesthetic exposure of the baselessness of any social hierarchy. The Whigs and Tories represented, at the time of their emergence, well-defined, though only nascent, political forces: the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie and the conservative aristocracy, respectively. Each of the forces had clear and specific priorities and
goals. To speak about the groundlessness of the interparty debate, it seems, was not necessary. But here is what the commentator of Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, E. Brandes, writes: «The warring political parties of the Lilliputians - high-and low-hipped-strikingly resemble the English Tories and Whigs, and the sects of the pointy-nosed and blunt-nosed, who can not come to a final decision on which end to break the egg, give a satirical image of the religious disputes of that time» [2: 410].
Swift thus sees through the artificiality of any social competition, in this case, political and religious. A major phenomenon in the literary and public life of England was the satirical drama of Henry Fielding, who adopted the Swiftian principles of political satire. In the comedy «Don Quixote in England» (1734), Fielding brilliantly uses the technique of ostracization, which allowed him to caustically ridicule the mores of the British establishment. In Pasquin (1736) and the Historical Calendar for 1736,» Fielding literally destroyed the system of political competition in England, showing himself a worthy successor to Swift in this respect.
Most of the satirical works of English satirists of the XVII-XVIII centuries were devoted to political and religious issues. Moreover, the initial stages of its formation are often marked by sharp criticism of individuals, and not of morals and vices. However, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, this feature of satirical discourse was almost completely eliminated. In any case, by the time the magazine satire of Style and Addison flourished, there was almost no need to talk about satire on faces. The quality and content of satirical discourse is decisively influenced by the nature of the social ideal that dominates the consciousness of the thinking part of society. English society met no obstacles to social differentiation. The ebullition of political and religious passions, taken from various points of view, can be assessed as either beneficial or disastrous, but one thing can be said with complete certainty: in such a public atmosphere, it is impossible to usurp the social perspective. Accordingly, the most important component is formed in the public consciousness, which leaves a deep imprint on mores and principles. This component is dystopianism, the refusal to design an ideal social structure in the here and now. A huge role in the formation of this component was played by the English «Augustinian» satire. The publishers of The Spectator and the Chatterbox, Addison and Steele, as the ideological heirs of Swift, Arbuth-not and Pope, were able to formulate and develop the principles of satire on morals, and not on faces, because they thought of the «final» overcoming of human vices not as an enterprise of the «pure» against the «unclean», which had to be completed in the foreseeable future, but as a personal, daily renewed business of everyone. The English satirists saw the source of the vice in moral laziness, the conditions for which, oddly enough, were created by the heterogeneous reality, divided according to passions and interests, where it was so easy to give up personal responsibility, replacing one's decision with the decision of the party or «breed».
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The classic English satire does not» scourge «social evil and» social vices», but exposes the illusory ideas about the objectivity of the evil that is not subject to the human will, as if imposed on a person by a particular community. This is the liberating, positive function of satire. Satire is effective in so far as it exposes the illusory ideas about the priority of the social structure in relation to the personal internal structure of a person. In the limit, satire also casts doubt on the so-called «human» nature.
We believe that the peculiarity of satirical typifica-tion in English literature lies in the consistent abstraction from the idea of the embodiment of the social ideal in real life: satirical maximalism, which is highly characteristic, in particular, of D. Swift. It is Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels that provides vivid examples of satirical typification in its English interpretation.
Strictly speaking, the type as such is the embodiment of frequently occurring in real life traits of character, social status, etc. in a separate person = character. In other words, realistic typing presupposes the discovery of the common in a multitude of disparate impressions. The realistic type, as a rule, results from the observations and thoughts of the author over a more or less long period of time. Satirical typification, on the contrary, is a multiplication of the particular, the unique: the typical in satire is not found in the material of life, but is embedded in it by the will of the author: "Apart from 1) formal satire, the following categories can be mentioned: (2) the fantastic narrative, which includes such forms as the beast-fable, utopian and anti-utopian fiction, and allegory; (3) already existing literary forms taken over and transformed into satirical comment, e.g. aphorism and epitaph; (4) parts of literary works in any of the genres taken over for satirical purposes" [7: 13].
In addition to «formal» satire, M. Hodgarth distinguishes a fantastic narrative, which is almost necessarily characteristic of satirical discourse, and which is realized in the forms of utopia, dystopia, allegory, and fable. It is in such fantastic images that satirical typification is realized. Why? The point, from our point of view, is that while the realistic type seems to fix the individual deviation from the norm, thereby revealing the illusory idea of free individuality, the satirical type fixes the mass submission to the absurd norm, thereby revealing the illusory norm as such. And in so far as the satirical type = character, if we talk about classic examples of satire-it is always a kind of fantastic community, whether it is the inhabitants of Swift's Lilliput, whether it is the generals from Shchedrin's fairy tale.
The concept of the fantastic community is at the heart of the satirical attitude to reality. Depending on what specific forms the realization of this concept takes in the public consciousness, the satirical traditions in different countries also differ. We emphasize that the fantasy community should not be thought of 5 as solely a figment of the imagination. Supernatural g characteristics may well be given to very real social £ (or-ethnic) communities, and satire may rely on such ° representations. Thus, the satire of the Enlightenment H often chose primitive societies as the ideal model of
unspoiled human nature: «Travel, both real and imaginary, was one of the leading literary genres. The idea of imaginary travel almost always included a satire on the existing European order, and it was achieved by insisting on the unspoiled, courage and high moral standards of the simple-minded peoples with whom the traveler allegedly met» [5: 206]. (Cf.: «The literature of this era is characterized by satire in the form of remarks of a savage who is surprised by civilization and sees in modern society those vices that are hidden from the usual view of a member of this society -a «secular person» [1: 185]. Recognizing the trend, it should be noted that the highest achievements of English satire, especially the works of Swift, indicate that this «ideal» has also undergone a satirical abolition: «Gulliver never meets noble and simple-minded savages. ... A shudder of disgust at the thought of his countrymen does appear in him after a long contemplation of models of nobility and simplicity, but not of human models. And this eerie mockery of Swift does not stupefy (like dreams of a «liberated nature»), but sobers « [5: 208].
We believe that the concept of the fantastic community as a basis for distinguishing different national satirical traditions can form the basis for the future typology of the satirical mode of artistic discourse.
THE CONCEPT OF A FANTASTIC COMMUNITY AND ITS SPECIFIC FORMS OF IMPLEMENTATION IN THE PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Ayvazova E.R.
The Russian State University of Justice
The article deals with the formation of an attempt at theoretical specification of the English satirical tradition. The main attention is paid to the theoretical aspect of the problem and the peculiarity of satirical typification in English literature, in a consistent abstraction from the idea of the embodiment of the social ideal of material life. Proposed the concept of «fantastic community» as a key in solving the question of national identity of satirical discourse, and also accumulated in the process of studying national literatures the existence of some power lines that moves the world literary process, the concrete historical nature of representation in each literature, even the most General aesthetic (poetic) categories.
Keywords: satire, humour, community, type, discourse, typification. References
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