КАТЕГОРИЯ СОБЫТИЯ В ПРОЗЕ РОКОКО (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ РОМАНА КРЕБИЙОНА-СЫНА «ЗАБЛУЖДЕНИЯ СЕРДЦА И УМА, ИЛИ МЕМУАРЫ Г-НА ДЕ МЕЛЬКУРА»)

Abstract

The category of an event is one of the most problematic areas in the contemporary theoretical literary studies. Both foreign and Russian scholars pay attention to singling out a set of markers of an event. It is no wonder that the so-called realistic prose is usually chosen as the concrete historical material for the illustration of the theoretical concepts due to its claims to the most authentic and realistic reproduction of the objective reality. The later involves the highly dynamic web of the socio-political, cultural, historical and family-private events that set a context of the human existence. Hence there persists a tendency to transpose the criteria of an event and eventfulness, developed on the basis of the realistic prose, on the texts built on different artistic, philosophical and aesthetic premises. Although Crebillon’s novel “Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit ou Mémoires de M. de Meilcour” belongs to the stage of the literary process outlying far from realism as an ideologic and artistic movement, it is still closely associated with the literature focused on the referentiality of the depiction. In this paper with the help of the criteria of the eventfulness set out in Schmid’s monograph “Narratology” we explore how the eventfulness of “Les Égarements du cœur et de l'esprit”, seemingly corresponding to the notions of the poetry of reflexive traditionalism, eludes its description in the categories of “unpredictability”, “consecutiveness”, and “nonrepeatability”. Realistic features of an event are becoming more blurred against the background of the narrator’s concentration on motivation of the protagonist's behavior which once in the high society passes the way from the struggle for the autonomy of Self to acquiring verbal and nonverbal behavior strategies.