Performative Discourse in E. Grishkovets Monodramas

Ageeva Natalia PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Department of Russian and Foreign Literature, Theory of Literature and Methods of Teaching Literature; Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University 630028, Russia, Novosibirsk region, Novosibirsk, Vilyuiskaya str., 28, building 3 jcl@ngs.ru Other publications by this author

The relevance of the research topic is primarily due to the fact that with the great interest of literary critics in the work of E. Grishkovets, the question of the genre and generic specifics of his monodramas still does not find an unambiguous solution. In general, recognizing the attribution of these works to the dramatic kind of literature, researchers often analyze them, resorting to categories that are more characteristic of the epic, which, unlike drama, has a dual-event nature ^[1-7]. The hero's speech, as a rule, is described as a narrative built on the principle of a stream of consciousness, which, in turn, leads to statements about the unique narrative system of the plays of the author under study ^{[6, p. 196]}. The researchers' arguments concerning the spatial and temporal organization of monodramas, the specifics of their plot and, in part, the characteristics of the hero, as a rule, are related to what the hero is talking about, i.e., the narrated event is more in the focus of attention, while the event of storytelling, taking place, according to the law of drama, "here and now", is interpreted strictly within the framework of narratological science. A hero who talks about his past or topics of interest to him is considered not so much as a character with whom something happens in the process of speaking, but as a narrative instance (narrator, narrator).  This is partly provoked by the designation of the hero as a narrator, which is observed in the posters of the plays "How I ate the Dog" and "At the Same Time". It is curious at the same time that in later monodramas the hero is either defined as a young man ("Dreadnoughts"), or is nominated as a "Speaker" ("+1"). It is also noteworthy that in the plays "Farewell to Paper" and "Whisper of the Heart", published in 2018, there are no posters and remarks characteristic of most dramatic works. However, currently there are also works in which the subject of research is precisely the process of speaking the hero of a monodrama ^[8], which makes it possible to clarify and describe in more detail the genre structure of this version of the drama. In our opinion, the above indicates that the question of the correlation of narrative elements and anarrativity in monodramas in general and in the plays of E. Grishkovets in particular remains debatable and is of significant interest to literary theorists and historians.

The theoretical basis of this research was the work in the field of artistic discourse: the theory of the dialogical nature of art by M. M. Bakhtin ^[9-11], which has already become a classic, and was developed in the research of V. I. Tyupa ^[12-14]. This is due to the fact that in order to identify and describe genre-forming factors in the monodramas of E. Grishkovets, we resort primarily to the analysis of their discourse. The material for the study was six monodramas by the author – "How I ate a dog", "Simultaneously", "Dreadnoughts", "+1", "Farewell to Paper", "Whisper of the Heart", written by him in different years, including published editions of two of the listed plays.

The first thing you should pay attention to when analyzing the genre and discursive specifics of E. Grishkovets' monodramas is the speech of the characters, which does not, at first glance, have a well–balanced and verified structure: it is confused, divided by pauses, indicated in the texts of the plays by both remarks and ellipses. The utterances of the characters often seem to have no thematic unity and are interconnected only by sudden associations that came to their mind in the process of speaking. The heroes of monodramas tell and talk about very diverse phenomena: for example, about railway workers and travel, soldiers and sailors, photographs and paintings ("Simultaneously"), about meetings with former classmates, the Motherland and the history of mankind ("+1"), about words, steam engines and cars, blotting paper and inkwells ("Farewell to paper"). Interestingly, in statements on any particular microtheme, marker words are used, not just pointing to it, but also repeatedly repeated: "For example, you walk through the market, and you see how some seller lays out apples, good, tight apples. Wipes them, each, with a cloth, and lays them out. And here you will see such apples, and even imagine how you bite into them with your teeth, and they crackle, and even sizzle. And you feel the juice filling your mouth, and it even makes your mouth sour… And you will buy such apples, and think about how you will eat them..." ^{[15, p. 237]} or "I recently found out that the machinists and these locomotives, well, that is, diesel locomotives, electric locomotives, well, these, ... on the railway… But, most importantly, the drivers ... on their locomotives ..." ^{[15, p. 203]}. It seems as if the character of the play is fixated on one topic, and then suddenly and often unexpectedly for the reader / viewer jumps to another, unrelated to the previous one. However, the seemingly disparate statements of the hero often turn out to be combined with words or expressions meaning enumeration or opposition: or, more, and more, or vice versa, etc. It is obvious that for the hero, all microthemes are united by a supertheme, which he does not speak directly about, but implies: a sense of fullness of being, which the hero seeks not so much to achieve as to reflect. So, for example, the super-theme of the play "Farewell to Paper" becomes a sense of the transience of life, as well as the fear of losing individual value orientations in a rapidly changing world, which worries the hero, and which he himself, by and large, does not realize until the very end of his monologue. The monologues of the heroes of other plays by E. Grishkovets are arranged in a similar way. In the play "Whisper of the Heart", the hero (Heart) lists everyday situations from a person's life: going fishing, working, watching television programs, visiting a doctor, etc. The story about the service on the Russian island of the hero of the monodrama "Kaya ate the dog" is constantly interrupted by digressions related to his childhood: going to the cinema on the movie "The Legend of the Dinosaur", feelings experienced on the way to school, waiting for cartoons that are shown on TV. It is worth noting that in this case the digressions relate not only to the personal biography of the hero, most often we are talking about a kind of collective image (a child, a schoolboy, a sailor, a demob, etc.). In the play "Dreadnoughts", the hero talks about what he has read in historical books, then about himself and his relationships with women. Moreover, he mentions himself much less often, but it is the definition of his status-value position that becomes the super-theme of the work, as it happens in the monodrama "+1", where the hero equally talks about himself and about other people and humanity in general, focusing not so much on the facts mentioned as on his emotional and intellectual reactions on this or that occasion.

The heroes of E. Grishkovets' monodramas constantly resort to explanations, comments and auto-comments, try to find a better word or give a more accurate example explaining what is being said, which gives the impression of a lively direct speech addressed to their interlocutor, who, although not explicitly present in the hero's space, is obviously implied. This is most noticeable in the monodrama "Whisper of the Heart", where the addressee of the statements of the Heart becomes the person to whom it belongs. The creation of the effect of a free monologue is also indicated by the fact that two of the six plays – "Simultaneously" and "Whisper of the Heart" – were published by the author in different editions ^[15-17]. This can be interpreted as evidence that the texts of monodramas do not assume a single final and rigidly fixed version. The author's supposed variability of the monodrama text is also indicated in the remarks of the play "How I ate the Dog", which have a recommendatory character: "The text can be supplemented with your own stories and observations. Those moments that are particularly disliked can be omitted" ^{[15, p. 169]}, "In this place it is better to show pictures or photographs of sailors or to depict what they are and what they do" ^{[15, p. 177]}. Even the temporary length of the performance becomes conditional: "It is desirable to tell this story for at least an hour, but not more than an hour and a half" ^{[15, p. 169]}. The practice of staging performances based on Grishkovets' plays indicates that directors do not neglect recommendations. For example, in the performance of the Ryazan theater laboratory "Kostin House", the history of the service on the Russian Island of the performer of the role of the hero – Vitaly Danilov was added. However, Grishkovets himself, being a director and performer in his productions, regularly replaces some episodes with others, adds something or, on the contrary, shortens, each time composing the text of the play anew, directly "here and now". Nevertheless, such variability of monodrama texts does not lead to the loss of their integrity and does not change their meaning.

As it was noted in our early work ^[18], the situations that the heroes cite as examples to explain their position also have an obvious focus on the reader/viewer: it is assumed that the hero and the addressee of his statements are people belonging to the same socio–cultural formation, so they not only easily recall something similar to what the hero is talking about, but they also experience similar feelings. All this, on the one hand, brings the points of view of the hero and the reader as close as possible, just as it happens in narrative texts. On the other hand, it is the "mobility" of the monodrama texts, the recognizability and repeatability of some facts and situations presented by the characters that casts doubt on the status of the eventfulness of what is being told. Everything that the characters of the plays talk about, in fact, is just an excuse for his reflection, taking place "here and now" in the stage space. So, for example, it happens in the monodrama "Farewell to Paper", where the hero, throughout his monologue, talks about how the world is changing with the transition from writing on paper to using electronic means of transmitting information. His statements, at first glance, are similar to the explanations of the narrator in the chapter "This will kill that" of the novel by V. Hugo "Notre Dame de Paris". However, there is something more behind the hero's reasoning – the fear of losing the human self, individuality, interpersonal relationships, which is only explicated in the very finale of the play. Thus, the communicative intention of the heroes of the monodrama is not limited only to the transmission of the information received, and the elements of narrative in their speech are accompanied by purely performative replicas that explain and clarify the topic for both the interlocutor and the hero himself.

The heroes of all the monodramas studied by us in the act of their speaking ask the question of their identity to themselves, self-identity. Considering from this point of view the plays of E. Grishkovets, it is worth dwelling in more detail on two of his early works – "How I ate a dog" and "At the same Time", since narrative elements are observed in them in a significantly larger volume than in other works. It is worth noting that the first of these plays is most often considered by researchers as narrative ^[3-6], since the hero describes the situations that happened to him during his service on the Russian Island in a relatively chronological order, building them according to the model of the initiation plot. For example, in his speech he clearly sets spatial and temporal landmarks, dividing the idyllic space of the house and the infernal space of the Russian Island, setting the boundary between "before" and "after" the service. At the same time, the hero not only describes different situations that happened to him, but also tries to comprehend changes in his status and attitude. So, for example, the symbolic duel of the antagonists, expressed in showing an indecent gesture to the pilot of a Japanese airplane, according to the hero, becomes a sign of his transition from the status of a child to the status of a sailor, and the final transformation is the moment of secret night eating cooked Korean Kolya And dog meat. It is essential that in the presentation of this and other situations, the hero does not relate himself to the present with the former. However, he shares both himself-a child, and himself-a sailor, and his other hypostases at each specific moment of the time he lived. The hero, in the process of telling his personal biography, tries to comprehend the discrepancy between the "I of the past" and the "I of the present", and not only in situations that happened only to him, but also in the context of each person's life. This leads to the fact that the contradiction between the different hypostases, the hero's statuses, which do not disappear at the moment of his transformation, but become facets of his current personality, ceases to be a private situation and becomes a pattern of human life. It should also be noted that the hero's intention cannot be reduced only to the presentation of biographical facts. The central event of the monodrama is not something experienced once in the distant past, but a mental action explicated in words, aimed at the theoretical transformation of the object of communication, as evidenced by the very construction of the hero's monologue: constant auto-comments, self-comparisons, comparisons and clarifications. The purpose of the hero's speaking is not so much to present earlier events as to comprehend them in the present tense.

A communicative event unfolding in a monodrama presupposes another participating person to whom the hero addresses – the carrier of another consciousness, the reader /viewer. In this case, the viewer is not just a silent observer. The hero deprives his memories of some specific details, allowing the addressee to correlate his personal experience with his. Numerous small plots, tales, which are intricately woven into the main outline of the monologue, are actually taken from the collective past, broadcast both Soviet mythology and universal experience. Reader/the viewer is not a silent witness and judge in this communicative situation, he must sympathize, empathize, even participate to a certain extent, because if not physically, then mentally involved directly in the theatrical action played out in front of him: "Imagine – you woke up one morning, and you are a Hussar. That is, a real Hussar. You have such a special cap – shako, with such a long thing. You have such a little man, with an insane number of buttons and laces, trousers, boots, spurs..., here is a saber, and a horse. Such a big animal is a horse." ^{[15, p. 182]}.

The hero of the play "Simultaneously", like the character of the play "How I ate the Dog, also reflects on self-identity. In his reasoning, he tries to isolate the components of his own "I" and comes to the conclusion that it cannot be expressed only by the bodily principle ("... my intestines and my stomach are not Me. Where am I? <...> Here I have a pencil in my hand. I see this line. I just need to draw exactly the same. I can see her! And I can't. It means that my hands are not me" ^{[15, p. 208]}), but at the same time it is impossible to identify one's own self through a description of subjective reality, since his ideas about himself and others, his desires and dreams also do not fully describe him. He notes that both physical (objective) and subjective reality are absolutely beyond his control, since he has no way to control them. For example, the character says that he "hides" his real desires from himself, replacing the thirst for love and respect with the dream of becoming a sailor.

According to the hero, the only way to feel the identity of oneself in full is only in a situation close to cathartic, at the moment of the highest emotional or aesthetic tension. The feeling of simultaneity of being, which the hero calls "to feel the situation", "to feel what IS" ^{[15, p. 218]}, occurs instantly, but at the same time allows you to feel your integrity, reconnect with the world universe, combine both the objective and the subjective. It is this "simultaneity" that becomes the superteme of this monodrama, connecting disparate episodes into a single whole at first glance. Moreover, "simultaneity" can be traced at several levels of the structure of a literary text at once. Firstly, the character directly talks about her in many episodes: "For example, you left home for work ... with a briefcase or not necessarily with a briefcase, but with something in your hands. We came to work, and then went to lunch. You go, and suddenly you feel it!… There is nothing in your hands, where is the briefcase?! And in one split second you will feel the absence of a briefcase, and you will be scared, and you will remember that the briefcase was left at work, and in what place it stands, and how you put it there. And you will have time to calm down. In one split second" ^{[15, p. 219]}, "You go out, and here on the right is a tree, and the light falls like that, and the smell of wet dust, and the time of year… And you will feel the same, exactly the same as you felt this moment in childhood" ^{[15, p. 221]}. Secondly, the hero not only tells, but also shows the reader/viewer the simultaneity of being: "Turns on the fan, music begins to sound, suspended airplanes begin to sway" ^{[15, p. 205]}. Thirdly, even the title of the text itself not only lexically, but also graphically accentuates this: according to orthoepic norms, two variants of stress are possible in the word, and both of them are capitalized in the name of the monodrama – "Simultaneously". We also note that in one of the editions of the play, this is where the hero begins his monologue: "The fact is that the orthoepical dictionary of the Russian language states that both variants of the use of stress in this word are equal and equally possible. That is, both at the same time and at the same time – this is correct. Only both of these accents – simultaneously or simultaneously – that is, at once, it is impossible to use ..." ^{[16, p. 211]}. And fourthly, for all the seeming disparity of the topics that the hero speaks about, ultimately the episodes add up to a single whole, since they are not single events, unique and unrepeatable, but individual details that reveal in their totality the general pattern of being. The hero, referring to obvious and well-known facts, seeks to provoke the recognition of the situation by the addressee, to force him, if not to survive, then to reflect the same feeling of simultaneity. Thus, the mental act of the hero is verbalized with the obvious intention to clarify for the addressee (both for himself and for the reader/viewer) the status of the communicative object, to designate it, classify and comprehend. It should be noted, however, that the finale of the play indicates the impossibility of achieving an absolute understanding of the laws of being and achieving a sense of self-identity neither for the hero nor for the reader/viewer, just as a complete and adequate explication in word and speech of complex internal processes occurring in the consciousness of both the hero and the person in general is unattainable.

The monologues of the heroes of the plays "Dreadnoughts", "+1" and "Farewell to Paper" are built on a principle similar to that described above. Narrative elements, of course, present in one way or another in each of the monodramas, are strictly subordinated to the intentions of the characters, explicated in purely performative statements. However, unlike the heroes of the monodramas "How I ate a Dog" and "At the Same Time", the heroes of these plays choose a different communicative strategy: trying to define their self in the aspect of interpersonal relations and explain their understanding of human ("+1"), generational ("Farewell to Paper") and male ("Dreadnoughts" to a different extent, they refer to situations related not to themselves, but to other people (and these can be both well-known or known only to a narrow circle of historical figures, and literary heroes). Such references are due to the fact that the definition of identity to oneself is possible only in the presence of Another, in comparison with whom identification occurs. At the same time, as in Grishkovets' early plays, the reader/the viewer turns out not to be an antagonist, but an ally of the hero in the complex process of knowing himself and the world. Resorting to both little-known and textbook facts, the heroes use them as examples. The perception of the hero of himself and other people both in the gender aspect ("Dreadnoughts") and in the aspect of individuality and value categories ("+1", "Farewell to paper") becomes a superteme. As fundamentally Different, the heroes of these plays comprehend not only individual representatives of humanity who have played a certain role in history, but also hypothetical images of another person created by his own consciousness. Moreover, each of them is understood by the hero as a kind of standard with which he compares himself, but at the same time he can be both an ideal and an anti-ideal. It is interesting that in the play "Farewell to Paper" the hero draws a fairly clear dividing line between "we" and "they", where the former means not only people of his generation (including readers / viewers) who have similar life experience and value orientations, but also representatives of the distant past, united with a hero by his involvement in writing or drawing on paper. Young "people without handwriting" ^[17], children born in a radically changed world, according to the hero, become fundamentally different in the hero's mind. Through comparison with Another, the heroes of the plays try to determine their status and value position: who is each of them – a hero or a coward, a bright personality or a cog in the machine of history; will there be any trace left after him? It is also important to note that the characters of these plays are well aware that their self-image may not coincide with how other people see them, i.e. the conflict in each case unfolds along the line of "I-for–myself" - "I-for-others". So, the hero of the play "+1" at the very beginning of his speech designates the supertheme of his monologue: "No one knows me. (Pause. Smiles.) But not in the sense that I have no acquaintances and I don't communicate with anyone. Not in the sense that no one knows my name, how old I am or what I do... <...> No one knows me the way I myself would like to be known. Do you understand?! <...> I can't say that. I can't, not because it's a secret, but because I don't have such words" ^{[16, pp. 160-161]}. The hero of the play "Dreadnoughts" also stipulates his communicative intention: "And, by the way, it is in the books about ships... and there is such information about men that cannot be found anywhere else... neither in novels, nor... Nowhere to be found! Such information that I would like to report about myself... <...> If women had read these books, it might have become easier and easier for them. Maybe they would have looked at us with more hope... Yes, that's for me personally" ^{[15, p. 240]}. It is not enough for each monodrama hero to determine his own status for himself, he needs to convey what he knows about himself and the world to the addressee of his statements. But at the same time, the heroes of all the monodramas studied are well aware that adiscursive processes of consciousness cannot be fully expressed with the help of speech. Actually, the logic of building each of the monologues (each mentioned situation duplicates the previous and subsequent ones, showing the same phenomenon from different sides) is primarily due to the desire of the hero to get at least a little closer to mutual understanding.

The play "The Whisper of the Heart", at first glance, is fundamentally different from other monodramas by E. Grishkovets. Firstly, the reader / viewer does not see a familiar middle-aged man reflecting on various topics, but his heart. Secondly, the hero's speech itself is built up as a kind of quasi-dialogue between the Heart and the person to whom it belongs, indicated in the text through the pronoun "you", which is repeatedly used in replicas. The text of the play is replete with both questions addressed to an invisible interlocutor, and reactions to answers that remain inaudible to the reader / viewer, but are completely recoverable from the context. So, for example, the Heart from time to time pronounces the intended answer itself, accuses a person of lying to him and to himself, reminds him of various situations related to everyday life, threatens, asks, shares his experiences and small joys. It is curious that the typicality and recognizability of the situations to which the Heart refers in its speech gives quite reasonable grounds to assert that readers/ viewers who literally find themselves forced to identify themselves with the interlocutor of the hero also become the addressee. Thirdly, the narrative elements in the work are practically minimized, while the appellative replicas, prompting the addressee to remember, reflect, realize, accompany literally every utterance. However, with all the formal differences, the same invariant model of construction is found in this play, characteristic of E. Grishkovets' monodramas as a whole: the hero in his monologue tries to question human identity, essence, place in the world. And just as it happens in other mono-dramas, the question remains without a final solution, while the event unfolding before the eyes of the reader / viewer becomes a complex internal process of understanding, awareness of the impossibility of achieving an answer.

Thus, the analysis of the peculiarities of the discourse of E. Grishkovets' monodramas showed that the event of each of the plays lies in the situations addressed by the characters in their speech, and in the explication "here and now" before the reader/viewer of complex internal processes occurring in the minds of the characters asking ontological questions related to the self-determination of a person in the world.