Linguocultural characteristics of Julian Barnes’ “The noise of time”

Abstract

The article examines a number of linguostylistic means which are used in English-language biofictional texts in order to construct the image of Russia, particularly the image of Saint-Petersburg. With the onset of Postmodern Era experimental biographical fiction as a genre has gained a great popularity. The article explores linguocultural characteristics of J. Barnes’ “The noise of time”, the postmodern biography of the outstanding composer D. D. Shostakovich residing in the Soviet Russia.

For the purposes of this study, biofiction is defined as a hybrid literary form that is based on the biography of an actual historical figure. Its semantics reflects the intricate relations between reality and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity. The emergence of biofictional texts is closely connected with the development of the postmodernist philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. Representing postmodernist discourse quite explicitly, biofictional texts possess such constitutive features as fragmentary narration, various mechanisms of expressing intertextuality, and a montage of various discourse types, ludic modality.

One of the strategies used by biofictional authors for creating verisimilitude in the narration is the construction of external linguocultural context which reflects the actual spatial-temporal relations. The analysis of the elements belonging to external culture is carried out within the framework of interlinguoculturology, on the basis of the methodology, developed by V. V. Kabakchi and combining the linguistic methods of indirect observation and extrapolation. Our research studies the representation of biofictional English-language discourse, describing the Russian culture, by means of English language resources adapted in the course of the so-called “secondary cultural orientation”. The study aims at identifying linguistic markers of Russian cultural text localization, the so called xenonymic Russianisms.

The article provides evidence of such a constitutive characteristic of the narrative text under investigation as the intentional play with facts and fiction. Playing with the semantic correlation between reality and fiction, Barnes skillfully creates an authentic Russian linguocultural context within his English-language biofictional narration. Providing the readers with fact-based descriptions of the Soviet Russia, the English author includes in his text a lot of transliterated borrowings, lexical and semantic calques, proverbs and idioms, Russian literary allusions and quotations from Russian precedent texts. He thoroughly represents Petersburg-Leningrad toponymy. The findings of our research into the representation of external linguocultural context can be relevant to the further study of constitutive characteristics of biofiction as a postmodernist genre as this approach gives a new insight into mechanisms of presenting facts and fiction in the narration.