Gref E.B.
PARADOX AS A CONSTRUCTIVE ELEMENT OF NARRATIVE IN THE NOVEL WATERLAND BY GRAHAM SWIFT
Saint-Petersburg State University
The article deals with the analysis of principles of organization of narrative in the novel “Waterland” determined by the interaction of the narrator’s and the abstract author’s levels. Interpretation of the results of this interaction is seen as the function of the abstract reader.
Key words: communicative levels, abstract author, abstract reader, diagetic narrator, focalization.
The fictional world of the novel Waterland (1983) as a communicative system includes the author’s and the narrator’s communicative levels. In W. Schmid’s model of communicative levels [1: 40] these levels are given further specification with the identification of concrete instances (concrete author, concrete reader); abstract instances (abstract author, abstract reader); fictive instances (fictive narrator, fictive reader). The term abstract author is related to the term implied author introduced by the American critic Wayne C. Booth in 1961. The abstract author, according to W. Schmid, is the correlate of all the indexical signs in a text that refer to the author of that text [1: 42]. The word of the abstract author is the whole text in all its planes [1: 53]. The abstract reader, first, is “an assumed addressee to whom the work is directed and whose linguistic codes, ideological norms, and aesthetic ideas must be taken account of if the work is to be understood; second, it is “an image of the ideal recipient who understands the work in a way that optimally matches its structure and who adopts the interpretive position and aesthetic standpoint put forward by the work” [1: 61].