Способы вербализации главных героев в произведении Джека Лондона “Мартин Иден”

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Родина М. М. Verbalization methods of the main characters (based on the work of Jack London “Martin Eden”) // Филологический аспект: международный научно-практический журнал. 2023. № 06 (98). Режим доступа: https://scipress.ru/philology/articles/verbalization-methods-of-the-main-characters-based-on-the-work-of-jack-london-martin-eden.html (Дата обращения: 28.06.2023)

The issue of verbalization of emotions in linguistics has repeatedly become the subject of scientific analysis, which is due to both the complexity of the mechanism for designating human mental experiences and their very nature. According to G.G. Verbina's definition, emotion is a mental reflection in the form of a direct biased experience of the relationship of phenomena and situations to needs. Thus, the relevance of the article proposed to the reader is due to the increased interest of scientists in the study of the emotional sphere of a person [1, p.38].

The relevance of a study is determined by the presence in modern linguistics of an increased interest in the emotional sphere of a person, in the study of techniques and means of expressing emotionality in language and speech. In this regard, a more detailed study of linguistic and stylistic means of verbalization of emotions in artistic discourse, which is a reflection of the linguistic and cultural specificity of the emotional conceptual sphere of language, is of particular importance.

The object of the study is the text of Jack London's novel "Martin Eden".

The subject of the study is the means of expression of verbalization, stylistic techniques, linguistic and stylistic features of Jack London's artwork "Martin Eden".

The purpose of this work is to analyze stylistic techniques that contribute to the expression of the verbalization of the main characters of the novel.

The purpose of the study determined the formation of the following research tasks:

1. To study the concept and signs of verbalization;

2. Consider the factors that determine verbalization in the work;

3. To identify ways of verbalization and its transmission through stylistic techniques.

The methodological basis of the research was used in the work, such as functional and structural analysis of the context of the work, the method of continuous sampling, the quantitative method.

The theoretical significance of the work is that it contributes to the development of linguistic theory of emotions, as well as solving the problem of verbalization of emotions in a literary text, in particular, the concept and signs of verbalization are studied; factors determining verbalization in a work of art; methods of verbalization of emotions and their transmission using stylistic techniques are determined.

The practical significance of the work lies in the fact that its results can be used in courses on cognitive linguistics, text linguistics, linguistics, theory and practice of translation.

53 stylistic units selected by the selective method were used as the research material.

The representation of emotions and feelings in language has been the focus of attention of linguists for a long time and is studied within the anthropocentric paradigm by methods of psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, linguoculturology, discourse theory, stylistics and other areas of science.

The study of verbalization in works of art is an important and urgent task, since emotions play an important role in the conceptual and linguistic picture of the human world, they form the motivational basis of consciousness and social behavior.

Let's consider the key concepts for the study – the concepts of emotivity, emotion and verbalization in fiction. In works of fiction, emotivity acts as a way of forming a literary image, describing the feelings and thoughts of the characters, creating a general picture of their inner world, and it also conveys the relationship between the speakers well. Artistic communication does not correspond to speech: in verbal communication, gestures and facial expressions are arbitrary, but in works of art they are a specially created stylistic device. According to E. Sepir, who regarded language as an intuitive means, "the formation of an idea for language is more important than the manifestation of will and emotion" [2]. Nowadays, it is impossible to express support for his opinion, since everything in people is susceptible to emotions, including our creative thinking, evaluative behavior, internal introspection, etc.

First of all, we selected and analysed the metaphors in the novel.

Metaphor is the transfer of a name based on the similarity of features in the absence of real connections between traditional and figurative meanings. There are examples of metaphors used in the text of the novel:

(1) «with a wealth of golden hair» (p.8)

(2) «…there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded puzzles and conundrums demanding instantaneous solution» (p. 18).

(3) "He was no gentle lamb ..." (p. 20).

(4) "... lily-pale spirit sitting beside him" (p. 23).

(5) «Her music was a club that she swung brutally upon his head…» (p. 24).

(6) «Her pale face under its crown of golden hair» (p. 39).

(7) «A stream of short stories flowed from his pen…» (p. 95).

(8) «The pages of his mind were blank, and, without effort, much he read and liked, stanza by stanza, was impressed upon those pages…» (p. 57).

(9) "He was clay in her hands immediately, as passionately desirous of being moulded by her as she was desirous of shaping him into the image of her ideal of man" (p. 83).

(10) «But he did not meet that exalted personage, thanks to a Cerberus of an office boy, of tender years and red hair, who guarded the portals» (p. 93).

The use of metaphors by Jack London gives beauty, expressiveness and emotionality to speech, contributes to the creation of colorful images.

Personification is a kind of metaphor. The essence of this technique is that properties and qualities of living objects are attributed to inanimate objects, i.e. there is a transfer by similarity. Examples in the novel:

(11) "... his thoughts, sympathies, and emotions leapt and played like lambent flame" (p. 8).

(12) "... and delicious little thrills crawled up and down his spine..." (p. 13). "... delicious goosebumps crawled up and down my back..." (p. 15).

(13) "Her purity smote him like a blow" (p. 28).

(14) "... his blood turned to wine and sang through his veins" (p. 48).

(15) "The golden year was dying as it had lived, a beautiful and unrepentant voluptuary, and reminiscent rapture and content freighted heavily the air" (p. 171).

The transfer of the properties and qualities of a living being to inanimate objects and abstract concepts contributes to the creation of imagery and expressiveness of the writer's speech. Personifications are used by the author to create vivid images in the text of the novel.

Metonymy can be defined as a stylistic device based on transference by adjacency. The peculiarity of such a transfer is that it is based on real connections between direct and figurative meanings (concepts). A kind of metonymy is the name of a part instead of a whole - synecdoche. Examples of metonymy in the novel:

(16) "The eyes, weasel-like and cruel were looking at him complainingly" (p. 31).

(17) «Those bold black eyes he had nothing to offer. But those saint’s eyes alongside – they offered all he knew and more than he could» (p. 53).

(18) "Behind those black eyes he knew every thought process. It was like clockwork» (p. 54).

The stylistic technique of replacing a word with another based on the connection of their adjacent meanings – metonymy is used for the purpose of figurative representation of the facts of reality, creating visually more tangible representations of the phenomenon being described. Allegory is an expression of an abstract thought through a concrete image.

The first allegory we encounter in the novel is a painting.

(19) «An oil painting caught and held him. (…) There was beauty, and it drew him irresistibly. He forgot his awkward walk and came closer to the painting, very close. The beauty faded out of the canvas. His face expressed his bepuzzlement. He stared at what seemed a careless daub of paint, then stepped away. Immediately all the beauty flashed back into the canvas. "A trick picture", was his thought ..." (p. 7). Martin Eden enters Ruth's house, he is amazed by the beauty of this house. He is amazed by the people who live in this house.

Another allegory is Martin Eden's laundry job.

(20) «…he toiled and suffered over the beautiful things that women wear when they do not have to do their own laundrying. “Fancy starch” was Martin’s nightmare, and Joe’s, too. It was “fancy starch” that robbed them of their hard-won minutes. They toiled at it all day. At seven in the evening they broke off to run the hotel linen through the mangle. At ten o’clock, while the hotel guests slept, the two laundrymen sweated on at “fancy starch” till midnight, till one, till two. At half-past two they knocked off» (p.147). This job seemed to him the most difficult of all, to him, a seasoned sailor accustomed to difficulties. Because there is nothing more difficult than washing the dirty laundry of high society (especially vivid descriptions are devoted to underwear).

In the text of Jack London's novel "Martin Eden", the structural diversity of simile is widely represented as a stylistic device used by the author in the work to perform certain stylistic functions. Examples of the use of simile in the novel:

(21) "... he lurched away like a frightened horse" (p. 5).

(22) "... the amused glance... burned into him like a dagger-thrust" (p. 6).

(23) "Into his eyes leaped a wistfulness and a yearning as promptly as the yearning leaps into the eyes of a starving man at sight of food" (p. 7).

(24) "... his thoughts, sympathies, and emotions leapt and played like lambent flame" (p. 8).

(25) "He likened her to a pale gold flower upon a slender stem" (p. 8)

(26) "...smiling with pity and tenderness as only a spirit could smile, and pure as he had never dreamed purity could be" (p. 28).

(27) "He staggered along like a drunken man ..." (p. 29).

(28) "... glimmered Her pale face under its crown of golden hair, remote and inaccessible as a star" (p. 39).

(29) «His nature opened to music as a flower to the sun…» (p. 69).

(30) "Though he slept soundly, he awoke instantly, like a cat..." (p. 137). Simile is one of the stylistic devices often used by Jack London. In a literary text, simile, like metaphors, are a powerful means of characterizing phenomena and objects of reality. They greatly contribute to the disclosure of the author's worldview.

In the novel, the following epithets were used to describe Martin Eden:

(31) “He forgot about himself and stared at her with hungry eyes” (p. 12)

(32) “...his aggressive pride was forgotten...” (p. 20)

(33) “He looked over the newspaper he was reading, showing a pair of dark, insincere, staring eyes” (p. 30) These epithets contribute to the creation of a vivid representation of the hero; they cause a certain emotional attitude towards them.

Anaphora is a stylistic device consisting in the repetition of the initial element (one or more) in successive sentences. Anaphora refers to the means of the so-called poetic syntax. Being one of the richest sources of speech expressiveness, anaphora is widely used in literary texts:

(34) "Not a word had been spoken, and not a word was spoken for a long time" (p. 117).

Parallelism is a stylistic device based on the identical construction of two (or more) sentences or their parts. Depending on the lexical content of the elements of parallel structures, parallelism can express juxtaposition or opposition. In fiction, the main function of parallel constructions is to enhance the communicative and expressive significance of the utterance:

(35) «You wanted to create beauty, but how could you when you knew nothing about the nature of beauty? You wanted to write about life when you knew nothing of the essential characteristics of life. You wanted to write about the world and the scheme of existence when the world was a Chinese puzzle to you...") (p. 113).

Putting an adverb at the beginning of a sentence gives the utterance an emotional coloring:

(36) "At once began to rise the cries that were fiercely sad..." (p. 90). The concept of distance, as a syntactic phenomenon, is based on the potential ability of sentence components to move relative to each other within a sentence without changing their function. An example of breaking the components of a syntactic structure in the reverse order of their sequence:

(37) «Of his own class he saw nothing» (c. 85). "Being middle class, he didn't see anything."

(38) "He saw her hand coming out to his, and she looked him straight in the eyes as she shook hands, frankly, like a man" (p. 10)

(39) "Like her feminine eye took in the clothes he wore, the cheap and unaesthetic cut, the wrin kling of the coat across the shoulders" (p. 11)

(40) "His feet were no longer clay, and his flesh became spirit" (p. 31)

(41) "... while her instincts rang clarion-voiced through her being ..." (p. 12)

(42) «What I read was the real goods. It was all lighted up an'shining, an' it shun right into me an' lighted me up inside, like the sun or a searchlight" (p. 17)

(43) "Her gaze rested for a moment on the muscular neck, heavy corded, almost bull-like, bronzed by the sun" (p. 18) contains a bull-like comparison.

(44) Martin Eden's phrase "Yes, I ain't no invalid" he said (p. 19), which has a direct meaning No, I'm not disabled.

(45) "And to add confusion to confusion, there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that posed puzzles and conundrums demanding instantaneous solution" (p. 22), characterizing the servant, compares him to a sinister sphinx.

(46) "Sound ports we worked like niggers, storing cargo-mixed freight, if you know what that means" (p. 26) The author characterizes the work of Martin Eden and his friend in the laundry.

Jack London tries to characterize all the lawsuits and torments of the heroes.

(47) "I can hit like a mule with my arms and shoulders" (p. 27).

(48) "She wanted to lean towards this burning, blazing man that was like a volcano spouting forth strength, robustness, and health" (p. 29).

When phraseological turns are used for certain artistic purposes without change, they appear in the author's speech as one of the means that make speech more diverse, picturesque, expressive, and in the speech of characters – as one of the means of their linguistic and stylistic characteristics. Let's consider examples of phraseological units found in the novel:

(49) «…his speech had been so much Greek to her…» (c. 11).

(50) "He was no gentle lamb and the part of the second fiddle would never do for the high-pitched dominance of his nature" (p. 20).

(51) "Martin Eden came back to earth" (c. 29).

(52) "Oh, he knew it all, and knew them well, from A to Z" (p.52).

(53) «They were putting him more on a par with the young men of her class» (c. 110).

 The analysis of examples of linguistic stylistic units used in Jack London's novel "Martin Eden". To create stylistic expressiveness, the writer uses numerous stylistic techniques. The novel widely presents the use of stylistic means of semasiology, namely substitution figures and combination figures.

1. Such substitution figures as parallelism (26% of the analyzed material), metaphor (19%) and simile (19%), personification (10%) and phraseological units (10%), metonymy (6%) and epithets (6%), allegory (3%) and anaphora occurs less frequently in the novel (1%).

2. To create more imagery, Jack London filled the novel with a variety of phraseological units. The text of the novel often uses a set of stylistic units – convergence (about 80% of the work). As the linguistic analysis of Jack London's novel "Martin Eden" has shown, the author often uses several stylistic techniques in one sentence at the same time to describe and reveal the image of the main character.

3. Convergences play an important role in the creation of images by the writer, based on the choice of words, metaphors, epithets, metaphorical periphrases, metonymy, repetitions and rhetorical questions. These stylistic means serve to give speech expressiveness and imagery.

Thus, the linguistic analysis of the novel showed that the stylistic devices most often used by the author are metaphor, metonymy, simile. Convergences based on the choice of words, metaphors, epithets, metaphorical periphrases, metonymy, repetitions and rhetorical questions play an important role in the creation of vivid images by the writer. The use of various stylistic devices contributes to the strengthening of expressiveness, the creation of vivid images in the novel.