"Внутренний человек" модернизма: языки визуализации у Томаса Бернхарда и Френсиса Бэкона (original) (raw)

"Внутренний человек" модернизма: языки визуализации у Томаса Бернхарда и Френсиса Бэкона

2016, “THE INTERNAL PERSON” OF MODERNISM: THOMAS BERNHARD’S AND FRANCIS BACON’S VISUAL LANGUAGES

“THE INTERNAL PERSON” OF MODERNISM: THOMAS BERNHARD’S AND FRANCIS BACON’S VISUAL LANGUAGES Vera V. Kotelevskaya, PhD, Assistant Professor at Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia; e-mail: kotelevskaja.vera@yandex.ru Abstract. The comparative research of visual languages of Bernhard and Bacon is based on a comparison of fictional space and bodies in the novel Das Kalkwerk in which the name of the British modernist Francis Bacon is mentioned. Ekphrasis functions in the Bernhard novel as a ‘minus’device (Lotman’s “minus-priyom”) in which there is no description of a picture and its name. The concept “internal person” is treated in two contexts: the Christian confessional context and the historical one. The concept of the modernist character here fits the well-known Proust definition “all is in consciousness”. Two hypotheses are made by the author of the present article: 1) the image of Bernhard’s protagonist represents “the internal person” of a specific modernist character which strives for autonomy, isolation, reflection, and is represented through abstract means and reduction of realistic properties; 2) the mental properties and the ways of representation of the “internal person” tie Bernhard’s protagonist to Bacon’s figures characterized by undergoing a torture of distortion, dehumanization, and disfiguration. So the research contains the following conclusions: common features of visual languages used by Bernhard and Bacon are: thematic selection of existential conditions of a person (scream, violent immovability, execution, death); creation of the modernist aloof identity image; expressive deformation of a figure (character); reduction of realistic concreteness; a defabulization (both appear as “destroyers of stories”); abstraction; minimalism in composition; nonfinalism. Besides, Bernhard foregrounds the specified properties of the fictional world through his style. As a result, the comparative analysis of two semiotic codes, visual and verbal, reveals their relative isomorphism based on similarity of the world image and unity of the formal principles. Bernhard’s and Bacon's late modernist art shows a grotesque balancing of “the internal person” between completeness and incompleteness of any form and questioning the “criticism of language”. Key words: modernism, visual language, internal fictional space, poetics of the character, Austrian literature, Bernhard, Bacon.