Сommunicative-Functional Potential of Time as a Synergistic Vector of a Literary Work

Abstract: Developing in the second half of the 20^thcentury interdisciplinary scientific discipline synergetics has become a powerful methodological tool for research in the humanities associated with the study of society, culture, which are complex, self-organizing systems. Synergetics attracts the attention of researchers in the field of linguistics, the subject of study of which is language in all its diversity and complexity. The interest of linguists to the study of language functioning from the standpoint of synergetic methodology is due primarily to the fact that “the synergetic approach to the study of changing in language at different levels of its organization and forces a fresh look at some fundamental concepts, which have already become traditional” (Abakumov, 2013), which includes one of the important grammatical categories - the category of time.

Time is a fundamental category underlying the scientific and linguistic picture of the world. From antiquity to the present day representatives of different sciences have tried to find answers to many questions related to this category: about the reality of time existence, its nature, properties, its reflection of the real, past and future. The problem of time worried mankind at all stages of its development. Historians, philosophers and natural scientists turned to it, and only in the last decades of the last century, linguists and literary scholars also began to deal with the problem of time.

The category of time is one of the important universal categories. Special attention of modern scientists to this problem is associated, according to N. A. Nikolina, “with the rapid development of science, the evolution of views on space and time, with the acceleration of the pace of social life, with the intensified attention to the problems of memory, origins, traditions, on the one hand; and the future, on the other hand” (Nikolina, 2003).

The interest of linguists in the problem of text time became especially acute in the 70-80s of the 20^thcentury in connection with the rapid development of text linguistics. All researchers studying the manifestations of time in the text recognize the category of time as a text-forming category, but there is still no single clear term defining the category of time as a category of text. The beginning of the 21^stcentury is characterized by the rapid development of the interdisciplinary scientific field of synergetics, a science that has found its obvious application not only in the natural sciences, but also in the humanities, including text linguistic. As Oleinikova G. A. notes, “Expanding the horizon of research and rethinking usual in a new categorical and conceptual perspective allows a new interdisciplinary strain of science - synergetics, the science that studies the processes of formation of complex systems and reveals the spatial patterns of evolution of systems of living and nonliving nature” (Oleinikova, 2019). Here the author also notes that the principles of synergetics are reflected in the studies of text of different genres. The synergetics approach allows us to trace the spontaneity in speech and the influence of the communicative environment on the literary works.

The literary text is “changeable and fluid” [8, p. 50] and has “signs of movement” (Fedosova, 2005. p. 18), which, as T. V. Fedosova notes, is realized through text categories expressing temporal relations (Fedosova, 2005. p. 38). The problem of linguistic manifestations of time in the text is traditionally associated with the question of artistic time. For the first time literary scholars turned to the question of artistic time at the beginning of the last century, although early attempts to comprehend artistic time can be found in antiquity, for example, in the works of Aristotle.

As Oleinikova G. notes “the time of a literary work is the most important characteristic of its genre attribution” (Oleinikova, 2011, p. 65). For science fiction works this thesis turns out to be extremely relevant, since it is this genre that implies a mandatory portrayal of other-worldly, unreal, counterfactual reality. It is these works can clearly demonstrate the realization of artistic, fictional time in the plane of the real. Many researchers dealing with the problem of time in the text emphasize the conventionality of artistic time, its non-identity to real time.

Introduction into linguistic research of parameters of time, where a speech work begins to be studied as a process unfolding along the moving horizontal time in interactionwith the surrounding world, environment, allows the scientist to draw conclusions which completely fit into the modern synergetic paradigm. Temporary relationsare determined by the contextcreated by the writer of the reference situation, and more precisely, by ourknowledgeabout the surrounding world and the ability to project them onto the fictional world created by the author of the work.

The events described in science fiction literature often never happened, but, most importantly, they are impossible based on today’s scientific picture of the world. So, for example, arbitrary movements in time forward and / or backward (to the future and / or to the past) is a figment of the imagination of science fiction writers and the reader of a work in which such travels are described will certainly perceive them as a signal of counterfactuality, unreality of the described world.

The very idea of moving in time is rooted, firstly, in the well-known tradition, according to which time is usually understood in terms of space and, secondly, in the linguo-cognitive ability to describe temporal orientation using indicators of spatial orientation. At the same time, in the picture of the human world, Space and Time are separate entities with different properties. At the same time, in the picture of the human world, Space and Time are separate entities with different properties.

We cannot create time or change its course, but we master space, cognize it, change it. This is precisely the picture of the real world. The unreal world, what we call otherworld, is built on other laws, in particular, on the possibility allowed in science fiction to “change the course of time” by moving through different periods of time, fractals, just as we move at different distances in space. As H. Wells’ famous hero, The Time Traveler, in his novel “The Time Machine” (1895), argues: “things exist in four dimensions, three of them are space (length, width, density) and the fourth is time (duration)”:

Any real body must have extention in four directions:it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and – Duration. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time (W/T, 4).

Another means of enhancing the effect of authenticity in the depiction of temporal connections of reality is the introduction of the figure of the narrator into the narrative structure of the work. The undisputed classic in this regard is H. Wells’ novel “The Time Machine”, in which the main part of the story is told on behalf of the Time Traveler, the engineer who designed the time machine and used it to “travel” to various layers of the future. After returning from there, he tells about what he saw to his friends. One of them is the so-called framework (non-personalized) storyteller. The very first paragraph of the text “The Time Machine” reads:

The Time Traveller was expounding a recondite matter to us... He put it to us in this way – marking the points with a lean forefinger – as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness (W/T, 1).

The time traveler tells about his adventures to “us” (to us, we), and the reader of the novel is also involved in the audience. The further narration (entrusted personalized narration from the 1st person) is actually the story of the Traveler moving forward in his time machine over a variety of distances. So, testing a newly created car, he is transported into the future for only five and a half hours:

I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second …Had anything happened?… Then I noted the clock. A moment before it had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half past three (W/T, 15).

Five and a half hours passed in an instant. Having made sure that the machine is working, the Traveler moves into the future, the distance of his “jumps” from 1 month to 30 million years. Of all the stages of the journey, the narrator lingers longest in the coming year 802701, where he manages to survive strange and exciting adventures, meet a girl named Weena, and escape from the clutches of the bloodthirsty Morlocks who stole his time machine. Having regained his car with great difficulty, the Traveler flees, but not to another place (where there are no dangerous Morlocks), but to another time (where / when there are no more Morlocks).

The Traveler takes a similar step to get out of an unpleasant situation in an even more distant future, moving to which he sees that he is again in mortal danger: a monster-like crab approaches him. When the terrible claws are about to grab the hero, he moves forward one month:

Its claws were descending upon me. In a moment my hand was on the lever and I had placed a month between myself and these monsters (W/T, 69).

And again he does not like what he saw and he flies another 100 years in advance, where the picture is just as disappointing:

I moved on a hundred years and there was the same red sun, the same dying sea, the same chill air (W/T, 69).

The earth is dying, life on it goes to complete decline. Therefore, the Traveler is moving forward, now for 30 million years. When he stops, he sees a completely frozen and silent Earth without any trace of life. The exhausted Traveler returns to his present. In general, the distance of travel in time in the novel by H. Wells “The Time Machine” is equal to 30 million years forward into the future and then the same amount back to the present.

We see that in science fiction literature the distance of the depicted movement in time can be measured in millions of years, sometimes tens, and mini-jumps (1 month) and even micro-jumps (several hours) are possible.

So, using movement in time, time leaps forward and backward, different grammatical tenses different time plans, the author creates nonlinear development of the events depicted, thereby forming a synergistic interaction of times in the narrative.

Another element allowing to speak about the synergetic characteristics of timein science-fiction genre is the temporal deixis. The term “deixis” is derived from the Greek word denoting “indication” and denotes the use of linguistic expressions as well as other signs, which allow to read information during the reference to the coordinates of the communication act - its participants, its time and location.

It is important to note that deictic elements, both verbal and non-verbal, serve to indicate only within the context and focus only on the internal organization of thetext.

Let us stop our attention on the more striking components of synergetic relations - these are time pointers in the works of science fiction genre. Thus, in the novel by R. The essential component in the narrative construction is the image of the so-called looping route, which passes through the hero’s movement in space and time in the past or in the future with a certain return to the final point of the story - the present time, or bringing the unconfirmed cases to a logical end. The entire narrative line of the work is saturated with various time signposts:he’s five hundred years in the future, thirty years ago, 1970, 2001 and other markers.

If we analyze all the chapters of the novel “Doors into Summer” on the subject of hourly movement in space and the location of the harmony center, we can lay a loop-like route of the protagonist. The events of the novel begin on December 3, 1970 in Los Angeles. The harmonic centers of the first four chapters fall on the events that take place in the building (the bar - the decision - a year for a long nap, the company office - the meeting of shareholders, the intense meeting with Belle and Miles at the house of the last). In one day the reader learns about the important events in the life of the protagonist, which occurred during the three-year period. From chapters 5 to 9 the key events occur in the future, where the reader is transferred together with Deni. It is clear that the events in the future begin on December 13, 2000 and last until December 24, 2001. This period is described in nine chapters, the harmonious center of each of which falls on the events that take place in closed rooms - a closed space (the decision to find Riki, a list of the absence of savings in the bank (the hospital), the meeting with Belle (the hotel), Deni’s uneasy conversation with the watchmaker Twitch (the laboratory). Since, with the help of the time machine, Deni goes back into the past (in relation to the future), although from the position of the novel’s narrative it is the present time for the reader and the protagonist. Thus a loop-like model of the journey is clearly laid out.

The components of synergetic relations also include the use of verbs of motion, they not only preserve the semantics of the represented verb, but also focus on the time of action, its modal characteristics, attitude to it. Thus, when talking about the counterfactual movement of the characters in time, the authors operate with the vocabulary denoting movement in space: to move, to go, to travel, to start, to stop, to arrive, to fly, to put on pace. At the same time, there are metaphorically transposed semes of these lexemes, such as: time flies, time goes, to start/stop doing things, to arrive at a conclusion. In science fiction prose, these lexical units verbalize the theme of movement in time due to their semes with the meaning of movement in space:

We don’t know how to travel in time. Perhaps you’re required to fly in time just as you fly in space (C/S, 77);

A parallel with movement in space can also be seen in the following. Just as when moving in space, especially at high speed, a person can “skip his stop,” i.e., go farther than he planned, it is also possible to miss the time that the heroes need. So, for example, explaining the appearance of a spaceship at the bottom of the ocean, scientists decide that it is an uninhabited probe ship, built in the XXI century and sent into space to explore a black hole. On the way back the ship “misses” the time and gets to Earth not in the XXI century, where it was headed, but more than 300 years earlier:

“From the future” Harry said. “The craft was - will be – made in the future and has travelled backward in time, and appeared under our ocean, several hundred years ago May be it was an accident. Unintended” (C/S, 67).

A similar account of events with a distortion of the time continuum, with failure to fall within the planned time frame, can also be observed in R. Heinlein’s novel “The Door into Summer. Denis planned to return to the past for 31 years, 3 weeks, 1 day, 7 years, 13 weeks, 25 seconds, but changed back to the past for 31 years and 3 weeks (from 24th of January 2001 to 3rd of December 1970). Even though he arrived in Denver, not Los Angeles, this clear “hit” can be considered Twitch’s decisive break in the world of fantasy winnings. Unlike many science fiction works, in which there is often one cycle of time loop (in the past or the future with a return to the exit point in the present),in the novel “Doors into Summer”, the maneuver in time is a double loop, because the main character, having solved his problems, does not want to stay in his own time, but hurries to return to the future and there wait for his beloved woman.

All above demonstrate us that movement in time is perceptually perceived similar to movement in space. As the experimenter moves in space, the pictures outside the window of his vehicle change. The imaginary movement in time is also perceived by the experimenter as pictures changing around him, but in this case there is no succession of different loci, but a succession of different states of the same locus at different times of its existence.

Thus, we can conclude that the text is not a “frozen” structure, invariant in the

readers’ perception of it. The text has an infinite potential to reproduce a multitude of “text worlds” similar, but not identical to the author’s. Linguosynergetic features represent a systemic diverse concept, which includes on the one hand deictic elements of temporality, and on the other hand various types of time, which, combined in the fiction text, form a synergetic unity of narration.

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Fedosova, T. (2005). Temporal structure of the text as a component of the author’s idiostyle, p. 175.

Oleinikova, G. (20190. Synergetics as a methodological basis for multicultural language research. Scientific Bulletin of Izmail State University of Humanities, Izmail, Issue. 41. pp. 50-56.

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1 Associate Professor, PhD, Izmail State University of Humanities, Ukraine. Address: Repina St, 12, Izmail, Odessa Region, Ukraine, 68601, Tel.: +38 (095)0172833, Corresponding author: oleinikova1211@gmail.com.