Metabole as a Dominant Type of Verbal Image in Metarealism: Reasons for Distinguishing and Ways of Analysing It

Abstract

In the article the author analyses contemporary contents of the term metabole, as well as the ways of and limitations to using it. The term has been introduced by Mikhail Epstein with reference to metarealism, one of the largest Russian poetry schools, which emerged in the 1980s. The notion not only helps to understand the specifics of metarealistic language, but also makes analyses of this language more productive. By now, the content of the term metabole has expanded, which allows the author of the paper to look at this type of verbal image from several positions. Thus, from the point of view of linguistic poetics (Severskaya), metabole can be considered as a type of synthetic, contaminating method of word transformation, based on the mechanism of “realising”, “literalising” the metaphor. For example, in Aleksandr Yeryomenko’s sonnet “V gustykh metallurgicheskikh lesakh” [‘In the dense metallurgical forests…’] the metabole ‘metallurgical forests’ has a direct, literal meaning. In Ivan Zhdanov’s poem “More, chto zazhato v klyuvakh ptits, – dozhd’…” [‘The sea, clasped in the beaks of birds – rain...’] contamination encompasses various tropes: the complicating of the constructions of identification with predicative metaphors expressed by the participles (‘clasped’, ‘encompassed’) and the genitive metaphor (‘gesture of a tree’). From the point of view of theoretical and historical poetics (according to Broitman), metabole can be understood as one of the ways to revive the image language of syncretism, which expresses the relationship of identity of heterogeneous phenomena. For example, in the poem “Bortsy” [‘Wrestlers’] by Aleksei Parshchikov, cumulative images and parallelisms create an inversion of the myth about the origin of species. Applying combined philological methods makes it possible to see how metabolic imagery results from the contamination of various tropes and from the interpenetration of two image languages. For instance, in Andrei Tavrov’s poem “Blake i mladenets” [‘Blake and the Infant’] the accumulation of images forms a metaphysical picture, which correlates with the archaic motif of the path. At the same time, the description of the character of the poem is built through a contamination of tropes. The paper shows that the synthesis of linguistic, theoretical and historical poetics allows one to analyse the texts not only of early metarealism (Parshchikov, Yeryomenko, Zhdanov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko), but also pertaining to metarealism at the contemporary stage (Vladimir Aristov’s idem-forma, the before-verbal of Tavrov, Kutik’s intertextuality, Celtic poetics of Agris), and to various poetics associated with metarealism (the Dragomoshchenko line, etc.).