The concept of chronotope. The concept of chronotope in modern literature

It is impossible to separate the spatio-temporal characteristics of processes and events either in nature or in socio-spiritual life.

“Chronotope” (from the Greek chronos - time + topos - place), expressing the unity of the spatio-temporal dimension associated with the cultural and historical meaning of events and phenomena.

The concept of “chronotope” reflects the universality of space-time relations: it is applicable not only to material, but also to ideal processes.

The study of culture requires taking into account the unity of space-time dimensions.

One of the first to use this concept was neurophysiologist A. Ukhtomsky: he introduced the concept of “chronotope” into psychology and neurophysiology, assessing it as a dominant of consciousness, a center and focus of excitation, prompting the body in a specific situation to take certain actions.

M. Bakhtin used the concept of “chronotope” in literary criticism and aesthetics in his work “Essays on Historical Poetics.” These were the first projections of the idea of the interconnection of spatial and temporal relations into the plane of humanitarian knowledge.

Bakhtin introduced the concept of chronotope - a specific unity of spatio-temporal characteristics for a specific situation. He accepts Kant's assessment of the significance of space and time as necessary forms of all knowledge, but understands them not as transcendental, but as a form of reality itself.

The phenomenon of sub-play with time, space-time perspectives - the so-called. historical inversion, i.e. a depiction in the past of what in fact can only be in the future; stretching or compressing time in dreams as a result of witchcraft. This is the peculiarity of human and artistic consciousness - in its internal time it has full rights. Therefore it is worth distinguishing

· awareness of time - must be objective, accurately reflect its real flow

· time of consciousness – not tied to the outside world, allows for the absence of a time vector.

Thus, Bakhtin proposed a non-classical vision of human cognition: in addition to subject-object relations, it includes a synthesis of cognitive, value (ethical and aesthetic), as well as spatio-temporal relations. The philosophy of science of the 21st century should be built on this basis.

Bakhtin developed the idea of a chronotope, which made it possible to create a unique ontology of the novel. “In the literary and artistic chronotope there is a merging of spatial and temporal signs into a meaningful and concrete whole. Time here thickens, becomes denser, becomes artistically visible, while space intensifies, is drawn into the movement of time, plot, history. Signs of time are revealed in space, and space is comprehended and measured by time. This intersection of rows and merging of signs characterizes the artistic chronotope.”

The introduction of the chronotope allowed M.M. Bakhtin to reconstruct the logic of the formation of the novel depending on the depth of inclusion of space-time in it, starting from the adventurous Greek novel with its extremely abstract indicators of space-time to the chronotope in the novels of F. Rabelais, in which very specifically “everything turns into everything.” MM. Bakhtin proved that it is the boundary of the genre that constitutes the boundary within which the chronotope of the novel as an object is formed, defining the exact genre boundaries of the chronotope in literature.

All this indicates that the space-time continuum is increasingly understood as an important principle, a condition for the ascension of any science - including social and humanitarian science - to the level of a conceptual-theoretical system. Therefore, it seems legitimate to raise the question of the possibility of its inclusion in the study of culture and to assume that the continuum exists in a hidden form in culture, and it is necessary to open it and clarify its nature.

A special topic to which so far undeservedly few works have been devoted is the introduction of the factor of time into literary texts, clarification of its role, image and methods of presence. reversibility, changes in flow rate and many other properties that are not inherent in real physical time, but are significant in art and culture in general. So, M.M. Bakhtin connects consciousness and “all conceivable spatial and temporal relations” into a single center. Rethinking the categories of space and time in a humanitarian context, he introduced the concept of chronotope as a specific situation. Bakhtin left a kind of model for the analysis of temporal and spatial relations and ways of “introducing” them into literary and literary texts. Taking the term “chronotope” from the natural science texts of A.A. Ukhtomsky, Bakhtin did not limit himself to the naturalistic idea of the chronotope as a physical unity, the integrity of time and space, but filled it with humanistic, cultural, historical and value meanings. He strives to reveal the role of these forms in the process of artistic cognition, “artistic vision.” Also justifying the need for a single term, Bakhtin explains that in the “artistic chronotope” there is an “intersection of rows and a merging of signs” - “time here thickens, becomes denser, becomes artistically visible; space intensifies, is drawn into the movement of time, movement, history. Signs times are revealed in space, and space is comprehended and measured by time."

In the context of Bakhtin’s historical poetics and the identification of the pictorial meaning of chronotopes, the phenomenon designated as a subjective play with time and space-time perspectives should not go unnoticed. This is a phenomenon specific to artistic, and generally humanitarian, reality - the transformation of time or chronotope under the influence of the “mighty will of the artist.” Such close attention of Bakhtin himself to the “subjective game” and the richness of the forms of time identified in this case force us to assume that behind the artistic technique there are also more fundamental properties and relationships. The “play with time” is most clearly manifested in the adventurous time of a chivalric romance, where time breaks up into a number of segments, is organized “abstractly and technically”, and appears at “break points (in the emerging gap)” of real time series, where the pattern is suddenly broken. Here hyperbolism - stretching or compressing - time becomes possible, the influence of dreams, witchcraft on it, i.e. violation of elementary temporal (and spatial) relationships and perspectives.

Rich possibilities for epistemology are also fraught with Bakhtin’s text on time and space in the works of Goethe, who had “exceptional chronotopic vision and thinking,” although the ability to see time in space, in nature, was also noted by Bakhtin in O. de Balzac, J.J. Russo and W. Scott. He read Goethe's texts in a special way. In the first place he put his “ability to see time”, ideas about the visible form of time in space, the completeness of time as synchronicity, the coexistence of times at one point in space, for example, thousand-year-old Rome - “the great chronotope of human history.” Following Goethe, he emphasized that the past itself must be creative, i.e. effective in the present; Bakhtin noted that Goethe “dispersed what lay nearby in space into different time stages”, revealed modernity at the same time as multitemporality - the remnants of the past and the beginnings of the future; reflected on the everyday and national characteristics of the “sense of time.”

In general, reflections on Bakhtin’s texts on the forms of time and space in artistic and humanitarian texts lead to the idea of the possibility of transforming the chronotope into a universal, fundamental category, which can become one of the fundamentally new foundations of epistemology, which has not yet been fully mastered and even avoided specific spatiotemporal characteristics of knowledge and cognitive activity.

CHRONOTOP

- (from the Greek chronos - time and topos - place) - image (reflection) of time and space in a work of art in their unity, interconnection and mutual influence. The term was introduced by M.M. Bakhtin. X. reproduces the spatio-temporal picture of the world and organizes the composition (see composition) of the work, but at the same time it does not directly, directly reflect time and space, but draws their conventional image, therefore, in a work of art, artistic time and artistic space are not identical to real ones, it is namely, images of time and space with their own characteristics and characteristics. For example, time in a literary work can be either correlated or not correlated with the historical, can be continuous (linearly unfolding) or have temporary rearrangements (see inversion composition, flashback), can be intentionally slowed down by the author (see retardation) or collapsed to stage directions (cf.: the deliberately slowly moving or even “stopping” psychological time reflected in the hero’s consciousness in individual episodes of F.M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” and the movement of time indicated by one phrase “a year has passed” in the story by A.P. Chekhov's "Ionych", motivated by the fact that the events that occurred during the specified period are not important for the further development of the action); can occur in parallel in different plot lines of the work (for example, Tolstoy’s technique of depicting simultaneous action in different points of space in the novel “War and Peace” is conventionally called “while”: “While the Rostovs were dancing in the hall of the sixth English... . with Count Bezukhov the sixth blow was struck"). The artistic space created by the writer is a certain model, a picture of the world in which the action takes place. The space can be wide or narrow, open or closed (for example, in F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” Raskolnikov’s closet is closed, the opposite bank of the Ob River, which the hero sees in the epilogue, is an open, open space), real (as in the chronicle) or fictional (as in a fairy tale, in a work of science fiction). Various components of poetry in works can often have a symbolic meaning. In Russian literature, we can talk about the special meaning of such elements of history as city and village, earth and sky, road, garden, house, estate, threshold, staircase, etc. (spatial symbols) and the change of seasons, the transition from day to day by night, etc. (temporary symbols). In addition, according to M.M. Bakhtin, the genre specificity of the work is determined primarily by H. (for example, historical or fantastic time and space in a ballad (see ballad), epic time in works of epic genres (see epic), subjectively reflected time and space in lyrical ones (see lyrics), etc.).

Dictionary of literary terms. 2012

Literature, like other forms of art, is designed to reflect the surrounding reality. Including a person’s life, his thoughts, experiences, actions and events. The category of space and time is an integral component of constructing the author’s picture of the world.

History of the term

The very concept of chronotope comes from the ancient Greek “chronos” (time) and “topos” (place) and denotes the unification of spatial and temporal parameters aimed at expressing a certain meaning.

This term was first used by psychologist Ukhtomsky in connection with his physiological research. The emergence and widespread use of the term chronotope is largely due to natural scientific discoveries of the early 20th century, which contributed to a rethinking of the picture of the world as a whole. The dissemination of the definition of chronotope in literature is the merit of the famous Russian scientist, philosopher, literary critic, philologist and cultural critic M. M. Bakhtin.

Bakhtin's concept of chronotope

The main work of M. M. Bakhtin, dedicated to the category of time and space, is “Forms of time and chronotope in the novel. Essays on historical poetics", written in 1937-1938. and published in 1975. The author sees the main task for himself in this work as exploring the concept of chronotope within the framework of the novel as a genre. Bakhtin based his analysis on the European and, in particular, the ancient novel. In his work, the author shows that human images in literature, placed in certain spatiotemporal conditions, are capable of acquiring historical significance. As Bakhtin notes, the chronotope of the novel largely determines the development of the action and the behavior of the characters. In addition, according to Bakhtin, the chronotope is a determining indicator of the genre of a work. Therefore, Bakhtin assigns a key role to this term in understanding narrative forms and their development.

The meaning of the chronotope

Time and space in a literary work are the main components of the artistic image, which contribute to a holistic perception of artistic reality and organize the composition of the work. It is worth noting that when creating a work of art, the author endows the space and time in it with subjective characteristics that reflect the author’s worldview. Therefore, the space and time of one work of art will never be similar to the space and time of another work, and even less will it be similar to real space and time. Thus, the chronotope in literature is the interconnection of spatio-temporal relations mastered in a specific work of art.

Functions of the chronotope

In addition to the genre-forming function that Bakhtin noted, the chronotope also performs the main plot-forming function. In addition, it is the most important formal and content category of the work, i.e. Laying the foundations of artistic images, a chronotope in literature is a kind of independent image that is perceived at an associative-intuitive level. By organizing the space of a work, the chronotope introduces the reader into it and at the same time builds in the reader’s mind between the artistic whole and the surrounding reality.

The concept of chronotope in modern science

Since chronotope in literature is a central and fundamental concept, the works of many scientists of both the last century and the present are devoted to its study. Recently, researchers have been paying more and more attention to the classification of chronotopes. Thanks to the convergence of natural, social and human sciences in recent decades, approaches to the study of chronotope have changed significantly. Interdisciplinary research methods are increasingly being used, which make it possible to discover new facets of a work of art and its author.

The development of semiotic and hermeneutic analysis of the text has made it possible to see that the chronotope of a work of art reflects the color scheme and sound tonality of the depicted reality, and also conveys the rhythm of action and the dynamics of events. These methods help to comprehend artistic space and time as a sign system containing semantic codes (historical, cultural, religious-mythical, geographical, etc.). Based on modern research, the following forms of chronotope in the literature are distinguished:

cyclic chronotope;
linear chronotope;
chronotope of eternity;
nonlinear chronotope.

It should be noted that some researchers consider the categories of space and the category of time separately, while others consider these categories in an inextricable relationship, which, in turn, determines the characteristics of a literary work.

Thus, in the light of modern research, the concept of chronotope is gaining increasing importance as the most structurally stable and established category of a literary work.

And space. Then Albert Einstein drew attention to the continuity and infinity of the space-time continuum.

In Russia, the concept of chronotope was used by the famous physiologist Ukhtomsky. He combined words of Greek origin: chronos - “time” and “topos” - place. And after him, the philologist and literary critic M. M. Bakhtin used the concept.

What is a chronotope in literature?

The concept of “chronotope” was introduced into literary criticism by Mikhail Bakhtin. However, in literature this word has a different meaning. In his article, where the philologist examined the meaning of time and space in literary works, starting with ancient epics, the scientist mentioned that he uses the concept of chronotope metaphorically. He focused specifically on the inseparability of these concepts. The plot of the work depends significantly on the time chosen by the author.

Chronotope is the unity of place and time in a literary work. The writer must introduce the characters and events at the chosen time correctly. Artistically describing the time and place of each scene is an important task, and if a novice writer fails to cope with it, the text will be damp and difficult to read.

According to the thoughts of Mikhail Bakhtin, time is the leading characteristic of the chronotope. Space only concretizes and complements. Space and objects in space make time tangible. Each point in time becomes visible thanks to material space and the course of events in it.

Bakhtin's article on chronotopes

In his article “Forms of time and chronotope in the novel,” the scientist analyzes the description of time and actions within space in several works. Mention is made of “The Golden Ass” by Apuleius, which has come down from antiquity in full, the famous novel by Dante Alighieri, the novel “Gargantua and Pantagruel” by F. Rabelais, and others. There are 10 chapters in Bakhtin's work. In the last, 10th chapter, the literary critic describes the forms of the chronotope and the content that is often contained in them.

Mikhail Bakhtin combined philological and philosophical research in his works. Thanks to the analysis of chronotopes, it is much easier for modern writers to build a plot.

Forms of time and chronotope in the novel

If the world of a work is completely mystical, it should be well described. A reader cannot be fully immersed in a story or novel if the description of that world lacks important details or if the narrative contains unforgivable logical errors.

So, what worlds did Bakhtin describe? The era of the story greatly influences the character and the course of events. Let us describe the forms of chronotope identified by Bakhtin.

Roads. Strangers may meet on the road, a conversation may begin and a story may begin.
Castle. The novel will feature drama related to the family past. Most likely, the narrative space is limited. Castles always describe the feudal past, mentioning great personalities - kings, dukes. There are galleries with portraits, valuables, and expensive antiques in the story. The plot can revolve around the trampled right of inheritance or a knightly confrontation, or the defense of the dignity of a knight and his lady.
Living room. This chronotope is clearly manifested in Balzac's novels. Living rooms are the birthplace of specific salon intrigues; this is an analysis of the characters’ characters and a search for context in actions.
A provincial quiet town. The description of the city and its inhabitants assumes a closed space where the passage of time is almost not described, since in the province everything goes on as usual and nothing changes.
threshold. This is a metaphorical space-time, where the novel is based on a crisis situation. On the “threshold” a story is built where there is no biography of the hero. Here the problem of a turning point in the consciousness of society arises acutely.

These chronotopes prevailed in the novels of bygone eras. The scientific article was published at the beginning of the 20th century, but the fantastic chronotopes that are popular today have not yet been covered.

Idyllic or folklore chronotope

Separately, it is necessary to mention the folklore chronotope, to which Bakhtin devoted an entire chapter. The idyll can be divided into 2 parts:

Family-idyllic chronotope. This is an idyll that is always tied to the natural region where the hero and his great-grandfathers grew up. Human life is always inseparably linked with nature. Another feature of such novels is the complete absence of everyday descriptions. Attention is paid exclusively to the romantic moments of life (new life, development, love, search for meaning).
Labor idyll. Work for the good of society is glorified.

Most often, these two forms appear together in the novel. The heroes of idyllic novels cannot go beyond the boundaries of this world artificially created by the writer. The outside world seems to be devalued.

Functions of the chronotope

The most basic function of a chronotope is to organize the space in which the characters live, to make it understandable and interesting.

Space-time determines the unity of the entire narrative. Time may be described differently in one literary work, but the reader should be organically introduced to each dimension.

Chronotope expands the reader's understanding of the world. The description of space should therefore not be narrow. If time and space are chosen conditionally, say, we are talking about the future, then you need to tell as many little things as possible about this new space.

Modern chronotope. Approximate content

The heroes of today's literature live in other, modern chronotopes. These works differ significantly from the era of, say, Stendhal or Honore de Balzac. Since the chronotope largely determines, new spatio-temporal frameworks also create new genres, meanings and ideas. Fantasy, post-apocalyptic, and space adventures emerge.

Now let’s look at what defining characteristics of modern chronotopes are identified by literary scholars today.

Abstraction and mythologization.
Doubling.
Use of symbolism.
The characters' memories are of great importance.
The emphasis is placed on the “flowing” time and the space “compressing” a person.
Time itself can be the center of the story.

Modern culture provides the opportunity for a writer to create individual fantastic chronotopes. In general, time itself is much more abstract today than it was 100 years ago. Nowadays there is a distinction between social time and subjective time, which are in no way connected with geographical time. Therefore, in literature, time-space is often blurred, depending on the internal affects of the hero.

Structure of time and space

What details does the chronotope in a work of art consist of? What does he look like? Time is formed by the cyclical changes of day and night, winter and summer, birth and death.

Space is built with the help of oppositions: north and south or the heavenly world and the underground, as the world is built in Dante's Divine Comedy. Space is also characterized as open or closed, holistic or discrete. Closed space is houses, galleries. Here it is necessary to describe the household items and atmosphere in the building. The open is forests, mountains, seas. For an open landscape, it is also advisable to give several characteristics.

Discrete space is used more at the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st century. This is a conditional, almost unspecified space. For example, from symbolist writers you can take the image of a mirror as space. Simply put, the image prevails over reality, and in this abstract context the hero develops. For example, as in the works of Franz Kafka. The most abstract space is characteristic of romanticism and lyricism. In such a “blurred” space, the hero exists separately from everyday life. But a realistic work cannot be left without everyday details.

Interaction of chronotopes

The more tenses are used, the more interesting and intricate the plot. The artistic worlds are in dialogue with each other. There can be a lot of worlds within one work. Chronotopes can be included in each other, smoothly transition or be opposed.

For example, in the book "Cloud Atlas" there are as many as 6 worlds with their own time and space.

Historical time moves from the 19th century into the immeasurably distant future. All 6 stories, 6 volumetric chronotopes have clear cause-and-effect relationships, while all the stories are collected into one puzzle - they are united by one theme. However, all these interactions of temporary episodes remain behind the scenes, only in the context of the plot.

Examples of chronotopes

Another striking example of combining several chronotopes into one plot is the integrity of 3 worlds in the classic novel “The Master and Margarita”. The first time was the 30s in Moscow. The second chronotope is biblical times and the material world corresponding to the era; the third world in the work is Woland’s well-known ball.

The third world includes the abstract transformations of Berlioz's apartment and the adventures of Margarita as a witch.

It is worth saying that in the novels of F. Dostoevsky, time always moves very quickly and this affects the characters. But in A. Chekhov’s stories it’s the other way around: time is almost absent, it freezes along with space.

Conclusion

So, what do we know about the chronotope in a literary work? The meaning of the word is given by M. Bakhtin; he explains this concept as a unified structure of chronos - time - and space where the events of the novel take place. The chronotope is the basis of the novel, which completely determines the genre of the work and gives the writer a “guide” to a possible plot. Time and space have their own function in the novel, their own structure.

The forms of time and chronotope analyzed by M. Bakhtin are basically no longer used, as completely new ideas and genres are being developed. have completely new chronotopes that affect the nature of the narrative and the behavior of the hero.

As artistic categories, space and time were the object of attention back in antiquity. Thus, Aristotle wrote about topos, that is, about the place of action - the prototype of artistic space. The concept of artistic space and time was most fully developed in the 20th century. Among the domestic philologists who made a significant contribution to solving this problem: P. A. Florensky, V. V. Vinogradov, V. Ya. Propp, A. Tseytlin, V. B. Shklovsky and others.

The reality created in a work of art is a model of the real world, passed through the filter of the author's perception. This model is organized according to the same principles as the surrounding reality, and accordingly is characterized by its inherent parameters and features, including time and space.

In literary criticism, the spatial-temporal organization is called the chronotope. This concept as a formal-substantive category of literature was first used in the works of M.M. Bakhtin, who gave a detailed description of it and described several main types of chronotope.

The essence of a chronotope is “the merging of spatial and temporal features into a meaningful and concrete whole.” Space and time in the artistic world form an inextricable whole and thereby determine the difference between this world and any other. They are not only interconnected, but also have the ability to define each other’s characteristics. In other words, the signs of time are revealed in space, and space is comprehended and measured by time. Thus, with a predominantly horizontal division, time is fundamentally linear, it is biographical, historical and each time subjective. With a vertical division of space, time tends to be cyclical; it is an indicator of an active dialogue between man and the Universe.

As M.M. pointed out. Bakhtin, the chronotope plays a vital role in the process of creating a work. According to the literary critic, the chronotope is a structural law of the genre, according to which natural time-space is deformed into artistic one. “Time thickens here, becomes denser, becomes artistically visible; space is intensified, drawn into the movement of time, plot, history" [Bakhtin, p. 186]. MM. Bakhtin identified such main types of chronotope as the chronotope of the Greek novel, the chronotope of the chivalric novel, the Rabelaisian chronotope, and the idyllic chronotope. As private chronotopes M.M. Bakhtin named the following chronotopes: meetings, roads, “castle”, “living room”, “provincial town”, threshold.

The chronotope also determines the image of a person in the artistic world. This image is always essentially chronotopic, since time and space determine the nature of a person’s relationship with the universe as a whole. In a literary text, we also deal with explicit subjectivism, with the author’s arbitrariness, which “cuts” a new world at its own discretion. Therefore, time and space here can undergo all kinds of transformations.

Artistic time and space are exclusively discrete, since literature describes only separate pieces of existence [Esin, pp. 98-99]. At the same time, the volume of “pieces,” both spatial and temporal, is determined by the author’s intention: it can be a fleeting glance at some detail (the space narrows to one object) or a lengthy description “from a bird’s eye view.”

Another equally important characteristic of a chronotope is the possibility of concretization and abstraction. The abstract chronotope has a high degree of conventionality; it is a “universal” space, the time coordinates of which are located “everywhere” or “nowhere”. Such a chronotope does not affect the artistic world of the work in any way; it is not related to the features of the action. A specific chronotope, on the contrary, “ties” the depicted world to various topographic realities and actively influences the entire structure of the work. It should be noted that a specific chronotope can acquire symbolic meaning: for example, time is mythologized, being divided into segments such as time of year and time of day.

For practical analysis of a work of art, as A.B. points out. Yesin, it is important to at least qualitatively determine the fullness, saturation of space and time, since this indicator often characterizes the style of the work.

Despite the above-mentioned unity of time and space, their interpenetration is apparent. This point of view was expressed by M.M. himself. Bakhtin and other researchers, in particular M.Yu. Lotman. M.M. Bakhtin gave the leading role to time, which subordinates space, acting as a dependent variable of the genre continuum. M.Yu. Lotman gave first place to spatial organization. According to the scientist, space in the text is a modeling language with the help of which any meaning can be expressed. In this interpretation, space acts as one of the universal means of constructing cultural models.

The chronotope, like any other component of the structure of a work of art, is a form of expression of the author’s consciousness. At the same time, it acts as a form of objectification of the author’s consciousness, since it participates in creating the illusion of the reality of the artistic world, allowing it to be “condensed” and “objectified” [Odintsov, p.178]. At the same time, the author’s voice sounds indirectly in this case: through the characteristics of space and time. The expression of the author's position through the spatio-temporal organization of the text is carried out through the connection of the chronotope with such a form of subjectification of the author's consciousness as the narrator.

In this regard, it is worth mentioning the concept of points of view developed by B.A. Uspensky. Along with other points of view, the researcher identifies spatial and temporal ones, which can be assigned to the narrator, storyteller, character, and move from one to another. Thus, the work may contain different types of chronotope, realized at different levels of the narrative, and accordingly their change may occur [Uspensky, p.98].

Taking into account points of view is important when creating a holistic picture of the artistic world of a work. What is significant is not only the actual content of the chronotope, but the principle of connecting fragments: changing the scene of action and time periods. In the interpretation of a work, it is important how mobile the character is, how freely he can move in time and space, and how self-willed and authoritarian the narrator is, who can have absolute omniscience and a position of being out of place.