Seriality as a principle of narration in contemporary prose (Nosov, Sal’nikov, Pelevin)

Abstract

This paper examines the narrative aspects of the category of seriality based on the novels of contemporary Russian writers. It is stated that, in contemporary literary criticism, the concept of seriality is used to characterize two different trends. The first is a designation of the desire for a repetition of intrigue and characters in works of popular literature. The second is a fundamental feature of the poetics of the avant-garde and postmodernist texts manifested in several ways (fragmentation, stringing of the same type of episodes, or deconstruction of a linear sequence of events). The analysis has proved that this serial structure of narration actualizes the neocumulative intrigue, aiming not to depict a static “imaginary” world or a catastrophic resolution of the initial situation (which is typical for the traditional cumulative plot model) but to multiply a paradigmatic event. This type of repetition indicates a provocation strategy that activates the consciousness of the addressee. Nosov’s novel “The Curly Brackets” uses the potential of the cumulative stringing of episodes corresponding to the occasionalistic artistic worldview and the occupation of the characters (who are magicians). Salnikov’s novels feature the interaction of series of diegetic events with events conditioned by the imagination of the focalizers (“Petrovs’ Flu”) or by the poetic intention of inserted texts (“Indirectly”). In Pelevin’s serial universe, the “self-closure” of the narrated events is never complete: their depiction involves a polyphonic system of interpretations with which to discover the semantic lacunae.